Hacker News Reader

Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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

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.

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com