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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

Is safety a criteria for school bus in USA? I thought it was only cost since the design is from the last century and many bus don’t even have seatbelts.

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The NHTSA recognizes that large busses are not cars and use a different solution.

Large school buses are heavier and distribute crash forces differently than passenger cars and light trucks do. Because of these differences, bus passengers experience much less crash force than those in passenger cars, light trucks, and vans.

NHTSA decided the best way to provide crash protection to passengers of large school buses is through a concept called “compartmentalization.” This requires that the interior of large buses protect children without them needing to buckle up. Through compartmentalization, children are protected from crashes by strong, closely-spaced seats that have energy-absorbing seat backs.

Statistics bear this out, taking a school bus to school is about 70 times more likely to deliver a student safely. In this context, 70 is huge.

It’s a nice way to say that kids can slam the seats.

They'll slam into the seats and still be safer.

YouTube has plenty of videos showing the insides of school buses during crashes, anything that ain't a frontal crash has kids sliding and flying all over the place.

They slide sideways out of the seats trough any serious horizontal forces, in the case of a rollover their heads will violently hit the roof as they literally take off from the seats [0], and then fall on the people on the ground side.

[0] https://youtu.be/OvNjVQkye8Y

YouTube also has plenty of videos of plane crashes, that doesn't mean that passenger aircraft are inherently unsafe, but that there are always risks associated with transportation and given extraordinary enough circumstances those risks will be revealed.

The point here is not "school buses are inherently unsafe", the point is that they seem to lack a basic safety feature that's otherwise common, even in passenger aircraft, that of seatbelts.

And airbags is a nice way of saying a little bomb is going to blow up in your face if you crash.

This NTSB PSA video explains it like "eggs in a carton" [0], but those bus seats look like regular benches, zero molding for an actual fit, like an egg would have inside a carton from all sides.

I understand that getting a horde of kids to put on seatbelts is a compliance nightmare, but imho it's difficult to argue how that wouldn't make a massive difference in a crash scenario, particularly during roll-over incidents [1]

[0] https://youtu.be/ksw67zFnuAE

[1] https://youtu.be/l4uHbX0SL_w (NSFW)

How common do you think that is? There seem to be several videos, but perhaps there's a lot of CCTV on school buses.

I can't remember ever seeing pictures of a city bus (as opposed to a long distance bus) overturned in an accident in Europe. City bus-type vehicles are used for public bus service and school bus service ("school bus" is a usage, not a type of vehicle) but searching for things like "bus crash England" shows very, very few cases where a bus has overturned, even when it's come off the road and slid down a slope.

If [1] is anything to go by, the bus needs to hit a similarly heavy vehicle to overturn. Could the American school bus design be susceptible to climbing up/rolling over a car, then tipping, compared to the typical European low-floor lower-centre-of-gravity bus?

(No doubt there are other factors that influence the American school bus design.)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/dec/16/bus-toppled-colli...

School busses have a ton of safety features -- just with a different strategy than is applied to cars. Part of the reason many don't have seat belts is because they are also designed to have safety features that work without seatbelts. The passengers are rowdy kids who might not always wear their seatbelts, so while adding them might increase protection in some cases, a safety design that primarily relies on seatbelts might not actually be a great idea.

US school busses are heavy and sit very high. Busses can be hit by cars with little force imparted to the occupants. The most dangerous thing about school busses is the risk it poses to the other drivers that hit it: https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Cra...

There have been a ton of DOT and NHTSA studies that have shown that seatbelts don't keep children that much safer during accidents that involve school busses, because the children are high off the ground, busses don't move at very high speeds, 48 children wearing seatbelts makes a firefighters rescue job 100x harder, etc...

Seat belts have been required in some states for decades at this point. We had them on buses when I was in elementary school 20 years ago, in NJ.

Now... getting kids to actually use them is a different matter.

In many of the most common situations - they just don't matter that much on a school bus.

The bus is generally the largest vehicle on the road, and an impact from a car (or even pickup truck/suv) is unlikely to significantly move the bus. Plus - the sit very high, and impacts tend to drive the other vehicle down - rather than moving the body of the bus.

The only situation they really are useful is when the bus rolls, and for buses that aren't driving highway speeds (which is most of them), they almost never roll (the only exception is essentially driver error - where the bus leaves the road on slope)

When it comes to batteries, I can't imagine safety not being a major design consideration. EV fires are maybe exaggerated a bit in the media because of the novelty whereas ICE vehicle fires aren't as newsworthy, but they're still a thing that can happen and could potentially be very destructive and hazardous especially on something with a huge battery pack like a bus. Using a kind of battery that tends not to burst into flames if ill-treated seems like a good idea.

IIRC the conclusion was that requiring seat belts slows down the loading / unloading process and decreases ridership enough that more kids will actually get hurt when their parents drive them to school instead (since cars are far more dangerous to riders than giant heavy slow-moving busses).

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