Why your child's school bus has no seat belts
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Fascinating, someone actually thinking rationally about safety.
Edit: I found a paper from 2007 that claims there were 129 extra driving fatalities in the last quarter of 2002 due to harsher airport security. http://aem.cornell.edu/faculty_sites/gb78/wp/JLE_6301.pdf (page 27)
Or that backscatter X-ray machines odds of giving you cancer are roughly equal to those of dying in a terrorist attack: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/16/5477568-are-...
If a plane goes down due to a terrorist attack those unfortunate people end up dying. If you just calculate the cost of saving those people by implementing tough security measures you can argue that it's not cost effective.
BUT you can't just figure the lives of the people on the plane into your calculations. You have to figure the impact to the airline industry if people become afraid of flying and what will happen to the US economy when another successful attack comes.
All three (lives on plane, airline industry and economy) are worth having tough security measures in place.
So if they stop all of these security measures and people die as a result, you aren't going to blame the TSA or the airlines..right?
Those seem to be ridiculously good numbers and back up everything stated in this article. I would worry that making ANY changes could actually increase that number.
In reality, these numbers are incredibly good, so much that chasing after any improvement is bound to be extremely expensive. The money that would be spent on seatbelts or whatever could obviously be invested to greater effect in some other effort.
Given these things, I would have to disagree with you, in this case it would be worth saving the final 6 lives.
Improving general road, pedestrian, and bicycle safety would be a far better preventative measure (or even offering more/more convenient school bus service) using any money that would fund seat belts, as car accidents are the number one killer of children.
We could install those seat belts on every bus in the nation, but that would cost hundreds of millions (and the article quotes information indicating that it might actually be counterproductive anyway, but set that aside for this argument). But that money could instead be invested in finding a cure for some childhood disease, or building a poison treatment center, or better law enforcement to keep some drunks off the road, and on and on. It seems to me that any of my suggestions are likely to save more than six lives a year, so why would you want to invest that money on something that is going to do less good?
If everyone drove such heavy vehicles they would lose almost all of their safety advantages.
tight : loose
find : lose
I think I worked at it so much I got it reversed in my head.
Choose and Chose also always give me pause when I write them.
I edited my post and fixed it.
You really don't want to live in a small community and the 'jerk that rear-ended the school bus in their F150.'.
I'd agree, six deaths a year out of 24 million is acceptable losses by any measure. I'd consider 1 in a million deaths in school busses to be fucking amazing, but 0.25 in a million is absurdly good.
It's remarkable how scientists, engineers and tech folk are able to abstract the description of a high-trauma event, especially for a young child's body and describe it in such matter-of-fact terms.
I note this here not only because it is striking to read but to also consider that we do this in our own work in the startup world. Often we will think of an act such as 'unfriending' someone as simply a manipulation and purge of row(s) in a database when, from the user's perspective, it may be a significant and deeply nuanced real-world event.
I think in both cases we could make better products if we articulated better and humanized events such as "going against the seat" or "unfriending".
(nb: I'm not comparing the impact of a mass body trauma to that of unfriending someone, fortunately for us there is very little if anything in startup world that has such real-world significant consequences)
It again brings to mind the (Canadian version of the) Iron Ring. Building things that abuse the forces of nature and exert power over the shape of our work, building these things and having them work, is distinctly beyond human terms. It's why you pair architects with structural engineers: a friend of mine always complains that his job is to remind architects about gravity. I wonder just how many lives have been secretly saved like that.
Of course, the best solution is to somehow hold on to both sides, but I think too much sentiment these days is reactionary against the dehumanized computer technology we're working our way past. I really liked the last slide of one of Job's recent keynotes where they put a signpost labeling the intersection of "technology" and "liberal arts". Always keep that intersection in mind even when you make a decision to walk in one of those directions looking for it.
I think you're right, because that reminds me of when I had to save Grandma. One day, I woke up to hear her screaming. She's very old and has weak bones. One day, her leg just snapped in half under her.
Maybe it is dehumanizing or something not to lose your mind just because your own Grandmother is on the floor screaming, lying in a huge pool of her own blood. But I had to do first aid. I had to get the paramedics.
I was the only person there and if I had gone to pieces, she would have died. She's fine now, though. We got her good care. She can even walk again.
>I think you're right, because that reminds me of when I had to save Grandma. [...]
You didn't fail to think of your grandma in human terms. If you had assessed things logically you'd have realised that the world is overpopulated and that your grandma is going to take resources that could be used "better" elsewhere and simply allowed her to die screaming. Even if you don't buy the overpopulation argument you can ask if grandma is decreasing infant or juvenile mortality; if not then she's not aiding proliferation of the species but hindering it.
Acting calmly and collectedly in a first-aid situation doesn't mean your not acting as a human being first.
I've done life-saving first aid in 2 situations (in as much as if someone had failed to act both people would have died; I think someone would have acted eventually in both situations) in both cases I've helped to save those who's genes should logically be removed from the gene pool through them having "defects".
Don't get me wrong I'm not at all saying that you acted wrongly, you acted as a human.
When you say "absolute terms" from what axioms are you starting?
If I think about things logically to that degree, entropy will screw us no matter what we do, so we might as well live as well as we can under whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. Everything we know about universe formation (which isn't much) indicates that we start from zero. After all, if a civilization before us started out with the tech to make new universes, you'd think we'd have seen evidence of them by now.
And now that we're done with that tangent, I do think that people who make life-or-death decisions need to do it based on facts, not anecdotes. And that's hard, because the tendency is to hear this story about how someone's kid fell out of a bus and want to fix it.
Because, hey, anybody can make up statistics and studies to say whatever they want and most people don't know if they're lying, so even the legitimate studies are given a credibility rating of zero and they listen to whoever they trust the most. Who might well be some idiot on TV that they happen to agree with on other issues, even if they don't know anything about anything. But that goes down another long tangent, if you get into it, because there are so many strategies for evaluating the information you get from other people and they all have some flaw or another in that you can get bad information if you're not careful. But nobody really has the time to get all the information they need and that leads to problems.
The dichotomy I spoke of is more plain in the architect v. structural engineer example. The human terms the architect considers are building usage, energy distribution, flows of traffic, aesthetics, color, material, use of glass. By given each one and many others due consideration the architect attempts to build a useful, beautiful structure for humans.
The structural engineer attempts to decide if it's going to implode after its first earthquake (or even before). He doesn't care whether humans enjoy it. He cares whether the architects' dream has a right to exist in reality.
In the bus example, this is meant to suggest that just because we can humanly fear for the safety of our children it is wise to design with precision and care for reality otherwise we might make something comforting but ineffectual.
To do this pretty near requires switching your mind into a mode that abstractly considers the forces of impact a child's body might undergo during a bus crash. I simply want to reiterate that the voice of reason may be cold, but you should be unafraid to keep it in your toolbox, so to speak.
But no, we got to be all "rational" about it (which is code for not do a damn thing).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States
Unless you have some statistics to back that up, I'm going to go ahead and doubt that. Drunk driving incidences where neither party dies rarely make the news so we don't think of them often, and incidences where the victim dies but the drunk driver doesn't make better news than incidences where everyone dies. They stand out in our minds more as a particular case of some sort of injustice.
Furthermore, drunk driving incidences with fatalities where the driver survives generate newsworthy trials and sentencing which drives further awareness of this case.
I'm not really sure why it helps, but I can certainly say it does. I know that when I panic and go stiff it hurts more as my tense body hits the rock. Even when in a similar mental state, hitting the rock with a relaxed body is less painful.
I've been in an accident between a car and a bus - it wasn't very serious, but it was a good insight into the weight of the bus. The biggest clue was the noise in that case - the bus shook a bit, but nobody came out of their seats.
Some supporting evidence, or even argument, would be nice. What's the relevant mechanism? (Possibilities include "injuries are not analyzeable in terms of physical properties" and "if they don't think of victims as humans, they won't take accidents seriously".)
BTW - Are you suggesting that the folks who analyze accidents are not sufficiently aware that humans are involved? Based on what?
Here is John Hamilton who made that remark:
http://web.jcsb.org/Trans/index.htm
What evidence do you have that he is a scientist, an engineer or a tech folk?
I went looking to verify that statistic thinking it can't be right, but I didn't find what I expected. According to the source below:
"Approximately 27 school aged children die in school bus accidents every year. Seven of these are passengers in a school bus and twenty are pedestrians. Of these twenty pedestrians, fourteen are killed by school buses"
In other words it seems your child is twice as likely to be run over by its own schoolbus rather than to die inside it in a collision!
http://www.onlinelawyersource.com/personal_injury/bus/statis...
About 440,000 public school buses carry 24 million children more than 4.3 billion miles a year, but only about six children die each year in bus accidents, according to annual statistics compiled the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
So yes, those six or seven only cover the students inside the actual bus.
I have a feeling that my thinking on the topic is tainted by the ever-present "Click it or ticket" billboards. This is something I feel despite having lived through the dawn of airbags, which were instituted in such a way to hype passive restraints. An example of that hype was that cars without airbags had to have automatic seat belts. Wouldn't that be just the ticket for those pesky non-seatbelt-wearing kids!
I wonder if in the future:
* adding seat belts will cause manufacturers/school districts to skimp on passive restraints
* the push to fuel efficiency will lead to lighter buses in the school district fleets, necessitating a move to seat belts anyway
Next up: why don't city buses have seat belts?
How do you go against the seat when the bus flips over?
And more seriously, do buses have crumple zones like cars do? If a bus were to roll over, is the passenger compartment designed to work like a roll cage? Or does it just collapse?
…evidence is incomplete and uunconvincing, and they unconvincing, arguing that…
It all comes down to money. If we put in seatbelts things will cost more and I'm not taking a pay cut.
No, I dont think each seat belt would need to cost 150-250 bucks especially when these are installed in bulk contracts.
This is pure speculation of course and, as you've said, only distracts from the real point. Whatever the cost, adding seat belts would probably only make things worse.
Keep those little frackers in their seats.
If everyone isn't buckled in, driver should stop the bus.
$15k to install seatbelts? What if they weren't made from gold (or the gold lining the pockets of the vendor).
I imagine it'd be very easy to get ejected from the back seat of a car in a rollover/accident.
Do you ever sit in the middle back seat?
BTW, in my country seat belts are mandatory in both front and back of the vehicle.
It's definitely cheaper, though. And, maybe more importantly, banning kids who won't stay buckled up would be very unpopular.
More importantly, that would likely result in more kids being killed by taking less safe modes of transportation to school (EDIT: if the article is true anyway).
Did you read the article? That is the point; most people share your view.
Buses are safer because the tightly packet seats act like little pods of foam, like little safety bubbles. If the bus hits something, it's 4 inches of foam that the kid is going to hit...basic physics, f=ma, a=v/t...the foam increases the time it takes the moving body to slow to a stop, and spreads the force over a longer period of time. Since it would be instantaneous, not aggregate (I'm making both of those terms up, no idea what you would actually call this) force that you care about, a longer time at a lower force == a safer collision.
Think about it like this: you have two buckets, one of them is called "child" and the other called "seat". These two buckets contain a liquid called "momentum". If the bus hits a brick wall, all of the momentum from the child is going to get transferred into the "seat" bucket. The interstitial bucket you use to transfer this liquid is called "force".
The foam seat means that you're using a little tiny thimble to transfer the momentum from the child to the seat...it takes a long time, and it isn't very big...it's "gradual".
It's counter-intuitive, but that is one of the reasons that buses are safe.
In any case, as a passenger on the bus, the result of the impact was quite minimal - there were no injuries on the bus, and the bus actually drove off afterwards (with no passengers and a bit of sheet metal scraping the pavement).
Granted, it's a different story if the bus hits a tree or is hit by a tractor trailer doing 70 mph.
Another reason why buses are safe? The bus is operated by a trained professional, most of which have years of experience driving the bus for hours every day.
Newton's law: F = m* a = m* dv/dt. If we assume the child and bus seat's masses are constant (no exploding kids, please!), this leads to F = d(m* v)/dt = dp/dt where p is momentum. When the child hits the foam seat, the force will not remain constant, that is it varies with time, leading from the above to dp = F* dt. We can find the change in momentum by integrating Force with respect to Time, leading to (in LaTeX notation) p_f - p_i = \int_{t_i}^{t_f}(F* dt) = I where I stands for Impulse.
The time-averaged force F' = 1/delta(t) * I = 1/delta(t) * delta(p), and this is where I think it becomes very clear that we like to have longer collision times for less damage. If we're interested in having a smaller average force for when the child hits the seat, then either delta(t) needs to be longer (the collision takes a longer time, due to e.g. the foam seat, the bumpers on cars, collapsible sections of the vehicle, etc.), or the change in momentum of the child needs to be smaller (e.g. if the collision is inelastic and the seat brings the child's velocity to 0, that is better than the seat bouncing the child back). It's easy to add another layer of foam.
Possibly the funnest lab in my high school physics class: shooting an egg at a brick wall and having it survive unharmed by encasing it in some design. (Mine was the Hindenburg of Bubblewrap.)
Yes, it sucks that 6 kids per year still die in a tragic manner. Horrific for the family. But the article is pointing out that busses are already much safer than more common forms of transporting.
So the issue isn't one of more safety, less safety. If we could afford every convenience, then more safety would be better. But you cannot take safety in isolation without consider other factors, such as cost, rate of accidents, etc.