Works Cited
Chan, Lisa. "Use of Infant Seats, Booster Seats, and Seatbelts Prevents Injuries and Saves Lives." Pediatrics for Parents 23.2 (Feb. 2007): 10-11. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true Use of Infant Seats, Booster Seats, and
Seatbelts Prevents Injuries and Saves Lives
By Lisa Chan, MD
Imagine you are late for work. You still have to get
the baby to daycare, the toddler to preschool, and the
oldest to first grade. You realize the infant and booster
seats need to be put into the car. The children often
fight you when you place them into their infant seat,
booster seat, and seatbelts. Yikes, there is just not
enough time and all destinations are within a mile of
home. You think, “I know people say to use car seats
and seatbelts, but are they really necessary all the
time? Do car restraints really make a difference? Is it
worth the time and effort to put these unwilling children
into their car seats and seatbelts? Maybe just this
once I’ll put all the kids in the back seat without their
car seats and put the baby in the seven year old’s lap.
No big deal, right?”
WRONG!
Car accident is the leading cause of death in children
ages 14 years and under. Studies have shown that
proper use of infant seats, booster seats, and seatbelts
prevents injuries and death. Educational programs
have been developed by federal and local agencies with
the goal to maximize use of these car safety devices.
Despite public efforts to encourag use of car safety devices,
we continue in our emergency department to see
children in car accidents who are not properly placed
in infant seats, booster seats, or seatbelts. In fact,
24% of children who were in a car accident and who
came to our emergency department were not in any
car safety device. Emergency Physicians and Medical
Examiners see the sad reality of not using infant seats,
booster seats, and seatbelts properly. Severe injuries
and deaths occur more often in these children than in
children properly placed in child safety devices.
My colleagues at University Medical Center and I have
studied the effects of not using car safety devices, and
the results are heart breaking. Injuries and death were
compared between children who were in car safety
devices and children who were not. Compared to children
who were appropriately placed in car seats and
seatbelts, children not in appropriate car seats and
seatbelts had to stay in the hospital an average of 20
times longer.
We found:
• Internal abdominal organ damage was 20 times
more likely in children who were not in appropriate
car seats and seatbelts.
• Internal chest organ damage was 13 times more
likely in children who were not in appropriate car
seats and seatbelts.
• Broken bones were eight times more likely in children
who were not in appropriate car seats and
seatbelts.
• Need to stay in the hospital was 15 times more
likely in children who were not in appropriate car
seats and seatbelts.
• Surgery was 13 times more likely in children who
were not in appropriate car seats and seatbelts.
• Need for blood transfusion was 28 times more likely
in children who were not in appropriate car seats
and seatbelts.
• Bleeding in the brain only happened in children
who were not in appropriate car seats and seatbelts.
Children in proper car seats and seatbelts did not
have this injury.
• Placement on a breathing machine was only needed
in children who were not in appropriate car seats
and seatbelts. Children in proper car seats and
seatbelts did not need to be placed on a breathing
machine.
• The only deaths occurred in children who were not
in appropriate car seats and seatbelts. None of the
children in proper car seats and seatbelts died.
Our study also revealed that children older than four
years old are more likely to be improperly placed in
car safety devices than younger children. Although
virtually all four to eight year olds should be placed in
booster seats, many parents mistakenly believe that it
is safe to use only a seatbelt once their child reaches
four years old.
Many readers no doubt shook their heads as they read the headline; uttered a few disparaging words about the auto industry's lack of concern about safety; and then continued their drive to work as they ate breakfast, sent email messages on their BlackBerrys and thumbed through the sports pages.
It is sad that all the auto industry's engineering and design horsepower still cannot compensate for that great killer loose on America's highways: driver stupidity.
Buried in most of the stories on the latest government report on traffic deaths is the fact that 55% of those who died were not wearing seatbelts, even though seatbelt use hit a record high of 82% last year and every state in the union except New Hampshire has laws requiring their use.
For the majority of us who do use out seatbelts and do not drive while intoxicated, the possibility of dying in a car crash is growing increasingly remote thanks to today's superior body structures, passive and active safety technologies such as airbags and stability control, plus our own common sense.
But a recent landmark study from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute shows the possibility of being involved in at least a minor crash is very real, even for seatbelt-wearing sober drivers.
After tracking 241 motorists for 13 months in vehicles equipped with sensors and video cameras, the study found 80% of all crashes and 65% of near-crashes are caused by driver distraction: dialing a cell phone, swatting a fly or drowsiness from not getting a good night's sleep.
Drowsiness increases a driver's crash risk by at least a factor of four, and drowsy driving may be significantly underreported in police crash investigations, the researchers concluded.
Cell phones were the most common cause of distraction, but they were not nearly as dangerous as reaching for an object rolling around in the back seat, which increased risk by a factor of nine.
"Advanced technology like the next generation of adaptive cruise control, blind spot detection and lane departure warming can help drivers refocus on proper vehicle operation before encountering a potential accident situation," Derrick Zechmair, Siemens VDO vice president-North American Restraint Systems, Safety Electronics, tells Ward's.
To quote the great philosopher Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Today's safety technology is saving our lives. Hopefully tomorrow's technology will save us from ourselves.
PHOTO (COLOR): An estimated 80% of crashes are preceded by driver inattention.
Parents shopping for sport utility vehicles with an eye toward their kids' safety may want to think again. A new study in the journal Pediatrics found that, even though most SUVs are heavier than most passenger cars, that potential benefit is offset by an increased risk of rollover. In the study of thousands of crashes involving children, SUVs were more than twice as apt to roll over, and children in any kind of crash were just as likely to be injured in SUVs as in cars. "The assumption that SUVs must be better because they're bigger is not necessarily true," says coauthor Dennis Durbin, a pediatric emergency physician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Regardless of what you drive, he says, the most important precaution a parent can take is to properly buckle the kids in--unrestrained children were 25 times as likely to get hurt in an SUV rollover as those with their seat belts on--and put them in the back seat until age 13.
Works Cited
Weat, Evan. "the seatbelts on the bus go click! click! click!." Indianapolis Monthly 29.1 (Sep. 2005): 136-472. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.
Of the thousands of Hoosier kids who ride school buses, the overwhelming majority make it home every day, on time and in one piece. It's a phenomenon most parents take for granted. Pete Baxter, state director of the Division of School Transportation Safety and Emergency Planning, says, "People tend to think of school buses in the same way as garbage trucks: They show up, pick up their load, then take it away." And for the most part, that's exactly how it works. No wonder, then, that the big yellow school bus is a benign icon in American culture, personified in kiddie books and lampooned in movies about high-school hijinks. Deliberate and lumbering, it is a haven from the arbitrary dangers that seldom touch children and are yet never far off. The school bus, it seems, is always there, taking kids to a safe place.
Statistics bear out the secure feeling that school buses provide. Of the roughly 25 million U.S. students who don't ride the bus during normal school-travel hours — who ride in a car, take a city bus, walk — nearly 800 are killed. By comparison, of the roughly 25 million children who ride school buses each year, on average, only about 10 are killed. In Indiana, the numbers are even more remarkable: As far as most authorities can recall, only two Hoosiers have been killed on school buses since 1975; according to federal statistics, only one has died in the past decade. Schoolbus-passenger deaths are so infrequent that fatality figures are less statistics than statistical anomalies.
Often touted as the ultimate gauge of bus safety, this by-the-numbers story has a mixed moral. To those in the school-transportation industry, the statistics bespeak a remarkable success: how officials at nearly every level of government transformed buses from deathtraps to the safest vehicles on the road. To safety advocates, on the other hand, even one child's death is one too many, and no fatality figure greater than zero should satisfy. Yet both readings of passenger fatalities overlook the fact that in Indiana and in the United States more children die near the school bus than on it — and that death, though the worst, isn't the only terrible fate to befall kids on the bus. April 29, 1996: A teenager in northern Indiana becomes a national hero when he brings his school bus to a stop after it veers off the road, strikes a concrete abutment, and nearly flies off a bridge and plunges into a creek. The driver, who'd suffered a seizure and blacked out, had failed to report his condition to school officials. October 31, 1996: A girl on a Pike Township school bus confronts a fellow rider who's rolling a joint. He lunges at her with a razor blade, slashing her hand as she moves to shield her face. August 24, 1998: A former bus driver in Columbus is arrested after offering to pay a teenage boy on his route to clean the bus, then pulling the bus to the side of the road and molesting him. January 24, 2000: A mother in Westfield receives a phone call from a stranger who says he has her 7-year-old daughter. The man says he found the girl standing alone at a rural intersection, crying and shivering in the minus-4-degree wind chill. Turns out she had been asleep on the bus when it dropped off her classmates at school, and the driver had failed to check the seats after parking the bus at his house. The girl had awoken, wandered to the side of the road, and was trying to find her way home, some three miles away. April 21, 2000: Paramedics find a Carmel Clay Schools driver sitting behind the wheel of an idling school bus. He registers a blood-alcohol level of 0.485, nearly five times the then-legal limit. Students on his route later report that he'd been weaving, had run over a median on U.S. 31, had driven west in an eastbound lane of 116th Street, and had blown through three stop signs and a red light. He had eventually stopped when he grew too ill to continue driving. March 1, 2001: A 6-year-old Indianapolis girl boards a school bus with a handgun she found in a dresser in her parents' bedroom. When her older sister takes the gun away, the safety is off and there's a bullet in the chamber. August 23, 2001: On the first day of classes at Indianapolis Public Schools, a gun battle breaks out on the near-north side, and stray bullets smash into the front of a school bus. (On numerous occasions in the past decade, projectiles ranging from bullets to BBs to flying wrenches have crashed through Indianapolis schoolbus windows.)
During roughly the same time span in which these events occurred, all kinds of bad stuff was happening to kids outside their school buses as well. While at or near bus stops, numerous children in Indiana were assaulted or abducted by adults. At least one was murdered. At least two were raped. At least one was viciously attacked by dogs. A middle-schooler was hospitalized with a collapsed lung after a fellow student stabbed him three times in the back. Three teenagers were robbed of their sneakers at gunpoint. An untold number of children were stalked, harassed or indecently propositioned by strangers. Two girls were flashed by a pervert with a history of committing sex crimes. At least 10 children in central Indiana were struck by passing traffic in what some transportation officials wryly call "the death zone" — the area where students get on and off the bus — or in the vicinity of their bus stops. At least five more were struck, run over or dragged by school buses. And as if all these perils weren't enough, the state now requires bus drivers to watch a video warning them that school buses are an attractive target for terrorists. "Do you think a terrorist might think about using a school bus as a vehicle bomb some day?" asks the narrator. "If it hasn't crossed their mind already." The video cuts to a wide shot of a bus sitting in the middle of an empty field. Without warning, it explodes in a ball of flames.
Yet, when it comes to the various dangers associated with buses, it is the broken glass and mangled steel of crashes that seem to capture the public's interest. "School buses are an emotional tagline for the news," says Cal LeMon, author of Unreported Miracles: What You Probably Do Not Know About Your Child's School Bus. "But the only time I see them on TV is when they're upside down." While random occurrences such as childmolestation and kids stabbing one another are scary, parents can often dismiss them as things that happen to other people's kids. But the idea that every child who rides a bus might be in danger, that some future tragedy might occur because of simple negligence, is truly terrifying. So even though children rarely die in bus crashes, whenever a bus does get into an accident — as more than 800 did in Indiana last year — the media, the public and parents all seem to ask the same question: When young children are required by law to ride in special safety seats, when billboards tell drivers to "click it or ticket," when federal law requires all cars to be manufactured with restraints, why in the world don't school buses have seatbelts? At the Center for Advanced Product Evaluation, IMMI's state-of-the-art research facility in Westfield, a small room connected to the main testing floor houses a "family" of anthropomorphic test devices, better known as crash-test dummies. Costing upwards of $90,000 apiece, they are anatomical human proxies, similar to the dummies you see on TV commercials but even more lifelike. They have faces, limbs and joints. They have intricately detailed vertebrae and heavy skulls. They have "skin" — vinyl sheathing that covers metallic ribcages. They wear sweatsuits and sneakers. They come in all sizes and weights, proportioned to match typical people of various ages and both genders. In engineering terms, they exhibit biofidelity. "When I first started working with them, I tried to be kind of gentle," says Seth Biddle, a burly calibration technician. "You can kind of see some of them as children." As he talks, he takes a screwdriver to a childlike dummy that's sitting upright on a stainless-steel table, its legs dangling over the edge, and removes its face.
IMMI researchers wanted to prove that the collision protection currently offered by school buses was inadequate. So they wired the dummies and taped yellow-and-black targets on their heads. Engineers then placed them in real school buses, some wearing IMMI-designed seatbelts, others unrestrained, and sent them traveling 30 miles per hour down an 800-foot track. Waiting at the end was a 3-inch steel plate mounted on a towering hunk of concrete and rebar weighing 1.5 million pounds; to ensure that the barrier could withstand the impact of such large vehicles, the facility's designers had constructed it to be three times as massive below ground as above. All together, say IMMI engineers, the structure contains enough concrete for more than a mile of sidewalk and weighs more than two fully loaded 747s. (A cup of coffee placed atop the barrier during one crash test didn't even ripple, they say.) In a specially designed "rollover cabinet," engineers tipped other buses to 90 degrees. They crashed one school bus into the back of another. They crashed a "bullet vehicle" — a semi cab — into the side of a bus. They've crashed more buses, boasts James Johnson, head of the project, than the rest of the auto-safety industry and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) combined. During the crashes, researchers monitored the dummies via built-in sensors and visual-imaging devices that followed the yellow-and-black targets on their heads. (The Center for Advanced Product Evaluation has its own generator; the electricity needed to power its equipment, if drawn from the city utility, would cause brownouts in Westfield.)
IMMI researchers studied the data and came to one conclusion: Dummies wearing seatbelts came out of bus crashes in better shape than their unbuckled counterparts.
But you don't need to understand sophisticated crash data to come to the same conclusion. All that's required is a look at the dummies. The ones that have smooth faces and look virtually new are the ones that wore seatbelts during the tests. The others-scuffed, beaten-up, chunks of rubber gouged from their faces-were sitting in the same beltless bus seats that your kids, if they're among the nearly 800,000 Indiana children who ride a school bus, probably sit in every day. In the parlance of school-transportation safety, large yellow buses fall into two categories: pre-1977 and post-1977. Pre-1977 buses are the type your parents rode to school, the type you probably rode to school. Most of them would be laughable by today's safety standards, if child deaths and injuries were something to laugh about. By and large, buses built before 1977 were little more than sheet metal bolted to big steel chassis, with four wheels and a diesel motor. Seats might as well have been park benches; children thrown into the back of a seat in even minor collisions were prone to losing teeth when their faces slammed into exposed steel bars-unless they flew over the seats altogether. In the undercarriage, large fuel tanks were often exposed to whatever hazards the bus might encounter on the road. In severe collisions, buses often disintegrated or collapsed, and children were often ejected or crushed. Subjecting a child to a traffic accident in most pre-1977 buses was like placing an egg in a toolbox full of wrenches and gasoline, then throwing it down a flight of stairs and hoping it came out unbroken.
Thanks in part to Ralph Nader, who in the 1960s began calling substandard school buses "cookie-cutter buses," the auto-safety revolution that transformed car manufacturing was, by the late '60s, starting to influence the school-bus industry. In 1967, UCLA researchers conducted some of the first scientific crash tests on school buses, and, not surprisingly, the buses performed horribly. The findings caught the attention of federal regulators, and in 1972 NHTSA began studying school-transportation safety in preparation for new regulations that would govern the manufacture of all buses.
The NHTSA regulations released in 1977 as part of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards revolutionized school-bus design. All new buses would have increased joint strength, making them less likely to tear apart in accidents. They would have fuel-system integrity, making them less vulnerable to explosions and fires. Bus roofs would be reinforced so as not to collapse in rollovers. New mirror systems would make it easier for drivers to see children walking or standing near the bus.
But the most significant development to emerge in 1977 was "compartmentalization," which, more than any of the other new regulations, acknowledged the fragility of schoolbus cargo. Originally introduced by the UCLA researchers, the premise, again, was that children are like eggs: They can take a bit of banging around without breaking, but only if you've put them in a good container. Regulators determined that the insides of school buses should, like egg cartons, have snug little protective cells for each passenger. Seats were moved closer together, and seat anchors were better secured. Seatbacks were raised. Padding was added, and seat frames were reengineered to absorb the blow of children being thrown forward; instead of being rigid, the joints would give slightly on impact. (It's worth noting that, unlike egg cartons, the padded cells in these new buses offered protection in only two directions: straight ahead and behind.)
The beauty of compartmentalization was its simplicity: With a few modifications, manufacturers could make bus interiors dramatically safer. And because the system was one of "passive" restraint, children would be protected without having to do anything but sit in their seats as they always had. School-bus culture, at least at the level of passengers and drivers, did not change one bit, and yet, nearly 30 years after the 1977 standards went into effect, passenger fatalities have plummeted. Despite being virtually invisible to all but those whose jobs it is to notice, compartmentalization has been a smashing success.
It has generally taken tragedy on a grand scale to spur further safety improvements. The advances of 1977 succeeded in keeping kids in their seats during collisions, but they failed to make it any easier to escape those seats when necessary. The most notorious example of such a need is now known simply as the Kentucky School Bus Crash, which occurred in 1988, when a church group from an exurb of Louisville traveled to King's Island on a yellow school bus manufactured just before the 1977 NHTSA guidelines went into effect. (Because the 1977 standards applied only to new buses, thousands of the old models remained in service; Indiana's last pre-1977 school bus was retired in 1999). A drunk driver in a pickup truck struck the bus on a stretch of interstate near Carrollton, Kentucky, sparking an inferno that engulfed the bus and its passengers. It was arguably the worst disaster in school-bus history: 26 children and one adult were burned alive partly because a narrow aisle and inadequate escape exits — areas neglected by the 1977 regulations — prevented them from getting off. The following year, a Coke truck collided with a school bus in Alton, Texas, shoving it off the road and into a pit of water. Twenty-one children drowned when they were unable to escape the submerged vehicle. Not long after, NHTSA upgraded federal safety standards for large school buses to include provisions requiring push-out windows, side-exit doors and roof exits.
Another of the most high-profile crashes in U.S. history occurred in 1995 when a commuter train in Fox River Grove, Illinois struck the rear-left side of a bus, killing seven. That accident helped prompt the introduction of a "noise-suppression" switch that many bus drivers can now activate at railroad crossings to make it easier to hear oncoming trains; Indiana law will soon require such a switch on most buses. (Trains are the archenemy of school buses. In the past 30 years, they've been involved in no less than 17 fatal bus crashes nationwide; one of Indiana's rare passenger fatalities was a driver in Madison whose bus was hit by a train.) WITH ALL THE IMPROVEMENTS IN
bus safety over the years, the absence of the seatbelt, the most celebrated of all automotive-safety features, would seem a glaring oversight. (In an informal, unscientific poll conducted for this article, 58 of 66 local parents said school buses should have lap/shoulder belts; 39 of 49 non-parents agreed.) As far back as the 1960s, when the federal government required all new cars to come equipped with seatbelts, the UCLA team that urged improved collision protection for school buses also recommended the addition of "active" safely restraints. But with seatbelt usage still not a habit among most of the American public, NHTSA limited its recommendation to compartmentalization, which required no behavior modification in users. Engineers consoled themselves with the rationale that large school buses differ from cars so much as to make seatbelts virtually superfluous. Because of their far superior mass — school buses can weigh more than 20,000 pounds fully loaded — they are essentially tanks without guns, impervious to the collision forces of all but the largest vehicles. "Size and mass equate to protection," says state official Baxter. "If you're going to be in a crash, would you rather be in a Yugo or a Hummer?"
It didn't help restraint proponents that when the federal government revisited the issue in the late '80s, no major school-bus tragedies had done for restraints what the Kentucky crash did for emergency exits. National seatbelt advocates, whose numbers and vociferousness were by then growing, couldn't point convincingly to a single event in which school-bus passengers, had they been strapped in, wouldn't have died. Accident reports showed that in most rollovers — the accidents in which restraints were thought to be most beneficial — children, while tossed around violently, tended to receive little more than bumps and bruises. "Unfortunately for the cause of seatbelts, kids are very resilient," says Alan Ross of the National Coalition for School Bus Safety. "No matter how you break their bones, they tend to bounce back and survive." Other studies showed that children wearing lap belts — lap/shoulder restraints would not be available on buses for another decade — might actually suffer head and neck injuries during collisions. And one can argue that if seatbelts had been in use during the "blockbuster" crashes of Carrolton, Alton and Fox River Grove, even more children would have been trapped, unable to escape the fire, flood and locomotive that killed their companions. Nevertheless, by the early 1990s legislation requiring lap belts on school buses was popping up in statehouses across the country. Safety advocates in New York, New Jersey and Florida managed to get laws passed that remain in effect today.
Indiana, says Baxter, "historically has done some progressive things with school-bus safety." As long ago as 1917, the state had laws on the books mandating that bus drivers show "good moral character" and "be experienced in the handling of teams or the driving of automobiles depending on which is used." (Of course, it wasn't until 2003 that state legislators got around to proposing a law banning smoking on school buses.) But Michael Dvorak, a former state representative from Granger, had no such luck getting seatbelts mandated. Several times in the late '80s and early '90s, he proposed legislation, and in 1993 he even managed to shepherd a lap-belt bill through the House, but it died in the Senate. To Dvorak's recollection, the Indiana School Boards Association and other groups thought the added cost of equipping buses with belts — up to $2,000 per bus — was unwarranted. More opponents bristled at government regulation. "Most of the resistance was from people who were for civil liberties," he says. "In Indiana we don't like being mandated to do anything by Indianapolis." The state has seen no significant, organized push for bus seatbelts since. IMMI HAS MADE A PRACTICE OF
anticipating government regulations. Before the feds even got around to requiring that new cars be equipped with seatbelts, IMMI — then known as Auto Safe — was making them. Starting in 1961, in a small office in downtown Indianapolis, the forward-thinking company produced lap belts for cars that came from the factory without them; weekend mechanics could buy the aftermarket restraints in auto-parts stores. And in the early '80s, IMMI was the first company to offer lap/shoulder belts for heavy trucks, and soon became the nation's largest supplier. To keep up with production, the company relocated to its current home, a large, modern facility near Westfield High School.
IMMI's entree into the world of school-bus seatbelts was in large part a matter of being in the right industry at the right time. Although not required to outfit school buses with passenger restraints, most bus manufacturers nevertheless equipped drivers' seats with the same IMMI lap/shoulder belts (sometimes called three-point harnesses) used in heavy trucks. Meanwhile, as legislators across the country debated mandating such belts on buses, IMMI was also selling school-bus lap belts in the few states where they were required (the company has sold more than a million in New York alone). Executives at IMMI saw a new opportunity: If the safety benefits of lap belts were dubious, why not offer superior lap/shoulder restraints of the sort used by school-bus drivers?
Bus manufacturers' response to IMMI's sales pitch was lukewarm at best. Since the compartmentalization standards of 1977, they had been required to offer passive restraints — essentially, seats that soften the blow when kids are pitched forward. Accordingly, bus-seat frames had been designed to bend when force was applied from behind. But engineers found that if a child was strapped to the seat in a collision, his weight would pull the whole seat-back forward — leaving the child seated behind him with no seatback to cushion his blow if he happened not to be wearing a seatbelt himself.
Recognizing that "the seat would fold up like a sandwich," as IMMI manager and engineer Steve Wallen puts it, IMMI recommended that bus-makers redesign their seats to accommodate lap/shoulder belts. Not surprisingly, the manufacturers, whose seats were already in compliance with federal standards demurred.
Undaunted, IMMI set out to design new seats themselves. The task fell to the company's SafeGuard division, already a leading supplier of child-safety seats for autos. Eventually, engineers came up with "smart frame" technology, a virtual seat within a seat: An outer frame complies with federal passive-restraint standards, while a smaller, inner frame carries the lap/shoulder hardware and acts independently of the larger frame. In a headon collision, though a buckled child pulls part of the seat forward, the frame remains in place to offer passive protection to a potentially unbuckled child in the next row back.
In the late 1990s, as IMMI engineers crashed huses and tweaked their "smart frame" design, NHTSA, at the direction of Congress, began a review of existing school-bus safety standards. Topping the agenda were lap belts and the newly available lap/shoulder belts that IMMI had designed. (IMMI's only notable lap/shoulder belt competitor, the smaller Ohio-based C.E. White Co., also made a three-point restraint system available for government testing.) Over the course of four years, NHTSA tested seatbelt technology and studied accident reports.
Observers widely anticipated another 1977-type revolution in school-bus safety. Legislators in California, where passage of a lap-belt law had once seemed inevitable, now refocused their efforts on lap/shoulder belts in anticipation of new federal standards. "California is known for sailing the uncharted waters of automotive safety," says Michael Martin of the National Association for Pupil Transportation: Just months before NHTSA released School Bus Safety: Crashworthiness Research in 2002, the Golden State finalized legislation requiring all new large buses purchased after July 1, 2005 to be fully equipped with three-point harnesses. This year, California saw a pre-July 1 bus-buying spree, as school transportation directors rushed to build up their fleets before the new law took effect.
But instead of launching a safety revolution, the 2002 report left much of the school-bus industry spinning its wheels. Given all the negative studies researchers had issued in the past, it came as no surprise when NHTSA reported that "lap belts appear to have little, if any, benefit in reducing serious-to-fatal injuries in severe frontal crashes. On the contrary, lap belts could increase the incidence of serious neck injuries and possibly abdominal injury among young passengers." What did come as a surprise was NHTSA's position on lap/shoulder belts — a position that, in Martin's words, was "clear in its ambiguity."
If three-point harnesses enjoyed "100 percent proper use," read the report, the number of child fatalities in frontal collisions might be reduced by one per year. A non-specified number of fatalities caused by other crash scenarios might also be avoided. Charles Hott, a NHTSA safety engineer who helped develop the 2002 Crashworthiness report, says that in most of the fatal crashes he studied, deaths were caused by "severe intrusions" in "un-survivable" crash situations. In other words, children sitting right at the point of impact in serious collisions were the ones who ended up dead. Three-point harnesses, Hott says, might eliminate the "occasional oddball ejection." But according to the report, "Other considerations, such as increased capital costs, reduced seating capacities, and other unintended consequences associated with lap/shoulder belts could result in more children seeking alternative means of traveling to and from school. Given that school buses are the safest way to and from school, even the smallest reduction in the number of bus riders could result in more children being killed or injured when using alternative forms of transportation." Rather than mandate lap/shoulder belts, NHTSA announced that it would establish standards for manufacturers who might voluntarily install them.
Although seatbelt supporters were less than thrilled by the report, many seized on the conclusion that lap/shoulder belts might save one life per year as ammunition for their cause. "We still feel restraints are absolutely essential," says Ross. "Compartmentalization just does not do enough." He points out that while the report focuses on fatalities, it says very little about how lap/shoulder belts might reduce serious injury — which, thanks to spotty reporting and state-to-state variances in accounting procedures, remains a gray area in bus safety. Ross contends that serious school-bus injuries number more than 3,000 per year; the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation argues that in the approximately 7,000 injury-causing bus crashes each year, most students suffer only "minor In moderate injuries"
IMMI's Johnson says that regardless of inconsistent statistics, his company's crashtesting should provide all the evidence needed to standardize lap/shoulder belts. "Compartmentalization did a very good job in frontal collisions-surprisingly well, considering what a violent event that is," he says. "It wasn't surprising, however, that Compartmentalization didn't do so well in rollovers and side impacts. It's really a common-sense issue. Historically, in every vehicle where seatbelts were introduced, injuries have been reduced by 45 percent"
Charlie Gauthier of the NASDPTS remains unconvinced. "I know this sounds harsh, but there are nominal values the federal government places on each life and each serious injury," he says. "NHTSA decided not to mandate seathelts because the benefits don't justify the cost in dollars. What safety advocates are upset about is the sheer economics of life." Indeed, as a group and as a rule, school transportation directors, always mindful of tight budgets, balk at any potentially unfunded mandate, even if they acknowledge some limited safety benefits of restraints. A new bus equipped with SafeGuard seats costs up to $10,000 more than a bus with standard seats; to retrofit an existing bus with the seats also costs at least $10,000. Considering that more kids die outside buses than on them, many argue that such money might be better spent on trying to prevent children from being run over. (As if to underscore the point, one bus driver interviewed for this story admitted that earlier in the morning she had attended a memorial service for a woman she had backed over and killed in a school parking lot.)
Although officials at IMMI attempt to put a positive spin on the Crashworthiness report, they were doubtless disappointed by the overall conclusion. With more than $3 million invested in the development and testing of the seatbelts — "crashing school buses is expensive," says engineer Wallen — the company was poised to be the go-to supplier when school districts across the nation scrambled to comply with the anticipated new regulations. Now, if IMMI wants its seatbelts on every school bus in America, it's going to have to market the hell out of them — a challenge it's approaching with missionary zeal. "The bus seatbelts are not a big-money order for us right now," says Wallen. "But we think this is the right thing to do." DUMMIES CAN TELL YOU HOW
lifeless bodies respond to crash scenarios. But they can't simulate the effects of crash forces on human tissue (for that, engineers use cadavers, though researchers in Germany caused an uproar in the early 1990s when it was discovered that they'd used child cadavers in crash tests). Nor can they tell you how real, live kids — unpredictable, willful, squirmy — are going to behave. And so the big question, the question that has always loomed over the school-bus seatbelt debate, is: Will kids wear them?
When IMMI completed its design for the SafeGuard bus seat, it needed a test market. Public-school systems around Indianapolis, invited to participate in a pilot program with the seats, declined. IMMI kept looking. And of the local private schools, Heritage Christian — which enrolls children from kindergarten through 12th grade — was one of the few large enough to have its own bus fleet. "I guess they thought working with a private Christian school allowed them more liberties and allowances than working with the bureaucracy of a public school," says Janice Gatliff, a former bus driver and assistant transportation director at the school. "For us, it was like the answer to a prayer, because our fleet happened to be a bus short."
It likely didn't hurt that IMMI and Heritage Christian share a similar ideology. IMMI bills itself as a Christian company; the entrance to its corporate headquarters is adorned with Scripture, a coffee table in the lobby is stacked with Christian-themed inspirational books, and a plaque in one conference room admonishes employees to "Honor God." Several IMMI higher-ups, says engineer Johnson, had "social" contacts with Heritage Christian administrators, and children of a top IMMI executive currently attend the school.
In 2002, Heritage Christian became the first school in America to run a bus fully equipped with lap/shoulder belts. IMMI researchers wanted to know how the belts held up to daily use, if the kids used them properly and could figure out how to adjust them, whether they'd actually put them on and keep them on, whether they'd beat one another with them, whether moms and dads would have any reason to complain.
Aside from a few children griping to their parents that the shoulder straps irritated their necks, the program was, by all accounts, a success, and as a show of gratitude, IMMI donated the test bus to the school. So pleased, in turn, were Heritage Christian administrators that they decided to retrofit eight buses with SafeGuard seats in time for the 2004-2005 school year, making the fleet the largest of its kind in the country.
In the year that Heritage Christian's drivers have operated buses with seatbelts, they've learned a few things. In the beginning, they had to take creative steps to keep kids in their restraints, such as bribing them with candy or pulling over and refusing to drive until everyone buckled up. Young children, most of whom had been riding in child-safety seats their whole lives, fairly quickly made a habit of strapping themselves in. But the older the passenger, the more difficult it is to get him to wear a seatbelt (teenage drivers ages 16 to 19 also have the lowest seatbelt-usage rate — 30 percent — in cars). "In high school, it's already not cool to ride the bus," says driver Cathy Mellinger. "Then you add seatbelts, and that's it." Or, as one Heritage Christian sophomore says, "They're stupid and painful."
Fortunately, Heritage Christian drivers haven't had to learn how well the seatbelts perform in crashes. But there are other benefits, they say. Student behavior has improved. The buses are quieter because it's harder for kids to talk to one another across the seats and aisles. And drivers have fewer distractions from students while they're on the road. All of these factors are main selling points in IMMI's marketing.
IMMI also notes that making children wear seatbelts on the bus reinforces the safety habit in other types of vehicles — a theory that sounds nice but is difficult, if not impossible, to prove. Anecdotal evidence suggests the correlation is not as strong as advertised. Research for this story included rides on local school buses — some with seatbelts, as at Heritage Christian, and many without, as at public township schools. One spiky-haired teenager on a Franklin Township bus, asked how he would feel about having to wear a seatbelt, said, "It would suck." However, he confirmed that he always wears a belt when riding in a car. Indeed, all the school-bus passengers interviewed, on buses with and without restraints, thought having harnesses on the bus either sucked or would suck. Yet all accepted as a matter of course that, in automobiles, they buckle up.
Whatever the ancillary benefits of restraints, most bus drivers and school transportation directors outside of Heritage Christian remain skeptical. In a recent national survey in School Bus Fleet magazine, 72 percent of drivers said they opposed seatbelts (good news, says an IMMI spokesperson, explaining that a few years ago the number would have been closer to 99 percent). Susie Fields, supervisor of transportation for Franklin Township schools, speaks for many of her colleagues when she says, "Seatbelts are something that would just get in the way — God knows, a school-bus driver has a thousand other things to attend to." Sandy Rushton, one of Fields' drivers, says, "I wouldn't be able to tell if a kid in the back was wearing a seatbelt or not-don't make me responsible for what's going on back there."
In 2000, a group of nine Avon drivers rode a single bus home after dropping off several busloads of students at band camp. En route, the bus ran off the road and rolled over three times, tossing the drivers around the inside of the vehicle like rag dolls. Though no one was killed, one of the passengers, veteran bus driver Marcia Moyer, wound up crumpled in the middle of the bus with torn abdomen muscles and compression fractures in her back. Yet not even that episode changed her mind about seatbelts. "Sure, we had damage that we might not have if we'd been wearing seatbelts," she says. "But I don't know if we would have been safer in other respects. Somebody would have had to get us out of those belts while we were upside down." AS EARLY AS NEXT YEAR, NHTSA
is expected to release a new set of federal standards for the manufacture and installation of lap/shoulder belts for school buses. But the belts themselves will still be optional. In the meantime, NHTSA's 2002 report and the persistent humbuggery of budget-minded school transportation officials appear to have slowed the political momentum that seatbelt supporters seemed to enjoy in the early 1990s. True, the governor of Missouri (where a recent crash left several passengers injured) has called for a task force to review "whether requiring seatbelts in school buses would prove effective in reducing fatalities and injuries in school transportation-related incidents." And true, proposals for legislation can be found in a handful of states at any given time. But in no state does passage of such legislation appear imminent. Even Louisiana, which passed a law similar to California's, delayed establishing a deadline pending the release of the 2002 Crash-worthiness report; implementation of the law is now in limbo.
While several medical associations and child-safety groups officially support the seatbelt cause, it lacks a unified, well-funded lobby to push for legislation. Ross, of the National Coalition for School Bus Safety, is the most vocal national advocate, but he's a full-time dentist in Connecticut who heads his campaign from home. "The only viable advocacy organization has been mine, and right now I'm rushing back to my office to fix people's teeth," he says. Though the group has members in Indiana, he says, none is willing to become a local spokesperson.
In the absence of a strong political movement or public-awareness campaign, it's essentially up to IMMI not only to sell its products, but to convince parents to call local school boards and demand that they buy SafeGuard seats for their buses. The company has run national TV spots contrasting unruly, unbuckled kids with their well-behaved, seatbelted counterparts — many of the latter from Heritage Christian. In California, promotional buses crisscross the state advertising "the safest school-bus seat in the world." On IMMI's Web site, interested parents can request a free promotional video that opens with images of crash-test dummies being hurled around inside buses and grainy black-and-white footage of a real rollover in Ohio — all set to a soundtrack of ominous minor chords. When happy children are shown wearing SafeGuard restraints, the music takes a sentimental turn. "If we've learned anything about raising families in this 21st-century America," says the narrator, "we've learned that we all must be vigilant and proactive with regard to any and all threats to the safety of our families."
Already, some 2,000 school buses in 40 states are equipped with SafeGuard seats (incidentally, a school in Bloomington was the first in the nation to buy them), and a public-school system in Indianapolis — IMMI won't say which — placed an order for the seats in time to begin using them this school year. "We think lap/ shoulder belts will sweep across the country in the next 10 years," says IMMFs Johnson. "NHTSA is the caboose on this train now."
"Historically," adds Johnson, "litigation has driven some safety improvements. But we hope that's not the case here, because it means a child has already been hurt." In fact, a child has been hurt. In 2003,16-year-old Raul Garcia was on a Perry Township school bus when the driver swerved to avoid a wounded raccoon in the road. The side of the bus swiped a tree. Garcia, said to be mentally challenged, leaned out the window to see what was going on, and the bus pinned his head against the tree, killing him instantly. He is believed to be only the second person to die from a collision on an Indiana school bus in 30 years, and the first child to die for as long as anyone seems to remember.
Haul's mother, Irma Garcia, is suing the bus driver, the city, the county, the state and the school district, in part for "failing to provide proper restraints or other equipment which would have prevented Raul, a student with diminished capacity, from sticking his head out of the window."
"There is no logical reason not to mandate restraints on school buses," says Garcia's attorney, Robert York. "In Indiana we have recognized that restraints in vehicles are important, and this event could happen again. But in order to get laws changed, it seems like a tragedy has to happen."
Still, it looks as though it will take more than this particular tragedy to get a restraint measure in Indiana. General Assembly action is not needed to make seatbelts the law; the State School Bus Committee has authority to decide what equipment school buses are required to have. "Right now, we're in a holding pattern waiting for the federal government," says state official Baxter. When local transportation directors ask if they should retrofit their buses with SafeGuard seats, he tells them no. If they say they want to order new buses with factory-installed seatbelts, he shrugs. "We watch what occurs nationally and try to be proactive," he says. "I would like to think we're not just sitting around reacting to major crashes. But on the state level, there is just no debate about this."
IMMI wanted to prove that the collision protection offered by school buses was inadequate. Engineers placed crash-test dummies in buses, some wearing seatbelts, others unrestrained, and sent them traveling 30 mph down an 800-foot track.
Research for this story included rides on local school buses — some with seatbelts and many without. One spiky-haired teenager on a Franklin Township bus. asked how he would feel about having to wear a seatbelt, said, "It would suck."
"Seatbelts are just something that would get in the way, says transportation director Susie Fields.
Section:Safety Two Lincoln concept cars have them. Is there a market?
At least one generation of drivers has the procedure ingrained in their psyche: Climb behind the wheel and reach with your right hand over your left shoulder for the seatbelt, pulling it to a buckle near your right hip.
How would drivers in the future react if seatbelts were anchored over their right shoulder and required buckling alongside, their left hip?
In recent years, Ford Motor Co. has unveiled two concept cars (the Lincoln Mark X and Continental) with first-rowseatbelts configured in this manner.
The subtle design-change has drawn little attention. Ford did not even mention the inverted seatbelts in the press release issued for the Mark X concept, which debuted it the 2004 North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
But some safety advocates say inverted seatbelts make sense as curtain airbags gain popularity. On a driver-side impact, the curtain airbag will prevent the driver from striking his head on the side window. On a passenger-side impact, however, current 3-point seat belts will not prevent the driver's upper body from lurching to the right, potentially striking his passenger.
Reversing the anchoring points for the seatbelts could lessen the severity of injuries in side impacts, assuming the vehicle has curtain airbags.
Seatbelt suppliers say reversing the anchorage points for first-row seatbelts would pose significant structural challenges.
Current configurations allow the seatbelt to be anchored on the vehicle's B-pillar - a rigid portion of the body well suited to handle heavy loads. It attaches to one buckle mounted to the floorplan, below the seat.
With this new concept, the inverted seatbelts could not be anchored to the B-pillar. Instead, they would be integrated into the seat.
And because the center of the vehicle lacks the structure afforded by the B-pillar, a beam in the floor would be necessary for reinforcement to handle the loads in the event of an accident, says Charlie Steffens, director-Safety Systems Technology at seatbelt specialist TRW Automotive.
With current conventional seatbelt configurations, the lap belt carries 60+ACU- of the load, while the shoulder belt carries the remaining 40+ACU-, Steffens says.
Despite Structural challenge's, Steffens says auto makers are discussing inverted seatbelts because of the arrival of curtain airbags. The current B-pillar anchoring point often interferes with the curtain airbag when deployed, so airbag designers such as TRW must design the bag to avoid the belt. Reversing the anchoring points would eliminate the problem, Steffens says.
TRW has produced prototypes with inverted seatbelts two or three times in the past for auto makers - with one project dating back to 1978. Those programs, Steffens says, were scuttled due to the structural challenges associated with seat-mounted belts.
Seat-mounted belts have had varying degrees of success in the U.S. marketplace. General Motors Corp. uses them for its GMT800 fullsize pickups and SUVs.
"A lot of times those belts are less compliant due to the fixed shoulder point" Steffens says. With taller passengers, the anchorage point on the seat actually is lower than the occupant's shoulder, causing occasional discomfort, he says.
Steffens calls the inverted seatbelt concept a "significant development issue," but he sees no signs from auto makers that such a design will be in production in the U.S. within the next five years. "If it will happen, we'd know," he says.
Chrysler Group and GM representatives say their companies have no plans to pursue inverted seatbelts in production applications. Even Ford says it does not intend to pursue the technology beyond its two recent concept cars.
Reversing the anchoring points creates other potential safety hazards, Steffens says. In a side impact, it is conceivable the buckle could strike the occupant. Or the buckle could be crushed or inaccessible to an occupant who is trying desperately to get out of a car after a collision.
"With it close to the door, ingress and egress is a problem," Steffens says. Plus, locating the buckle close to the door creates the possibility that occupants will sit on it, potentially damaging the buckle.
Autoliv North America, TRW's chief rival in the passenger restraint market, says it also is working on inverted 3-point seatbelts, as well as a 5-point belt to maximize occupant safety.
Autoliv calls its concept the "3+2-Point" belt, which is similar to the restraints used in race cars. Once the traditional 3-point belt is fastened, the occupant would fasten the additional 2-point belt, preventing the occupant from lurching from side to side in the event of a side impact or rollover.
The supplier, however, has no production contracts yet for the 3+2-Point belt system.
Is the overall concept of inverted seatbelts likely to move forward?
"It depends how much the design studio wants to spend," says TRW's Steffens. "There's a question whether it's better in a rollover situation - I'm not sure there's a real answer to that. But if a car is hit on the opposite side, having the belt in the middle of the car might be better
Chan, Lisa. "Use of Infant Seats, Booster Seats, and Seatbelts Prevents Injuries and Saves Lives." Pediatrics for Parents 23.2 (Feb. 2007): 10-11. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true Use of Infant Seats, Booster Seats, and
Seatbelts Prevents Injuries and Saves Lives
By Lisa Chan, MD
Imagine you are late for work. You still have to get
the baby to daycare, the toddler to preschool, and the
oldest to first grade. You realize the infant and booster
seats need to be put into the car. The children often
fight you when you place them into their infant seat,
booster seat, and seatbelts. Yikes, there is just not
enough time and all destinations are within a mile of
home. You think, “I know people say to use car seats
and seatbelts, but are they really necessary all the
time? Do car restraints really make a difference? Is it
worth the time and effort to put these unwilling children
into their car seats and seatbelts? Maybe just this
once I’ll put all the kids in the back seat without their
car seats and put the baby in the seven year old’s lap.
No big deal, right?”
WRONG!
Car accident is the leading cause of death in children
ages 14 years and under. Studies have shown that
proper use of infant seats, booster seats, and seatbelts
prevents injuries and death. Educational programs
have been developed by federal and local agencies with
the goal to maximize use of these car safety devices.
Despite public efforts to encourag use of car safety devices,
we continue in our emergency department to see
children in car accidents who are not properly placed
in infant seats, booster seats, or seatbelts. In fact,
24% of children who were in a car accident and who
came to our emergency department were not in any
car safety device. Emergency Physicians and Medical
Examiners see the sad reality of not using infant seats,
booster seats, and seatbelts properly. Severe injuries
and deaths occur more often in these children than in
children properly placed in child safety devices.
My colleagues at University Medical Center and I have
studied the effects of not using car safety devices, and
the results are heart breaking. Injuries and death were
compared between children who were in car safety
devices and children who were not. Compared to children
who were appropriately placed in car seats and
seatbelts, children not in appropriate car seats and
seatbelts had to stay in the hospital an average of 20
times longer.
We found:
• Internal abdominal organ damage was 20 times
more likely in children who were not in appropriate
car seats and seatbelts.
• Internal chest organ damage was 13 times more
likely in children who were not in appropriate car
seats and seatbelts.
• Broken bones were eight times more likely in children
who were not in appropriate car seats and
seatbelts.
• Need to stay in the hospital was 15 times more
likely in children who were not in appropriate car
seats and seatbelts.
• Surgery was 13 times more likely in children who
were not in appropriate car seats and seatbelts.
• Need for blood transfusion was 28 times more likely
in children who were not in appropriate car seats
and seatbelts.
• Bleeding in the brain only happened in children
who were not in appropriate car seats and seatbelts.
Children in proper car seats and seatbelts did not
have this injury.
• Placement on a breathing machine was only needed
in children who were not in appropriate car seats
and seatbelts. Children in proper car seats and
seatbelts did not need to be placed on a breathing
machine.
• The only deaths occurred in children who were not
in appropriate car seats and seatbelts. None of the
children in proper car seats and seatbelts died.
Our study also revealed that children older than four
years old are more likely to be improperly placed in
car safety devices than younger children. Although
virtually all four to eight year olds should be placed in
booster seats, many parents mistakenly believe that it
is safe to use only a seatbelt once their child reaches
four years old.
Works Cited
Winter, Drew. "On the Eve of Distraction." Ward's Auto World May 2006: 5+. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=20961531&site=ehost-live>.
[[javascript:openWideTip('http://support.ebsco.com/help/?int=ehost&lang=en&feature_id=van');|Vancouver/ICMJE]]
Many readers no doubt shook their heads as they read the headline; uttered a few disparaging words about the auto industry's lack of concern about safety; and then continued their drive to work as they ate breakfast, sent email messages on their BlackBerrys and thumbed through the sports pages.
It is sad that all the auto industry's engineering and design horsepower still cannot compensate for that great killer loose on America's highways: driver stupidity.
Buried in most of the stories on the latest government report on traffic deaths is the fact that 55% of those who died were not wearing seatbelts, even though seatbelt use hit a record high of 82% last year and every state in the union except New Hampshire has laws requiring their use.
For the majority of us who do use out seatbelts and do not drive while intoxicated, the possibility of dying in a car crash is growing increasingly remote thanks to today's superior body structures, passive and active safety technologies such as airbags and stability control, plus our own common sense.
But a recent landmark study from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute shows the possibility of being involved in at least a minor crash is very real, even for seatbelt-wearing sober drivers.
After tracking 241 motorists for 13 months in vehicles equipped with sensors and video cameras, the study found 80% of all crashes and 65% of near-crashes are caused by driver distraction: dialing a cell phone, swatting a fly or drowsiness from not getting a good night's sleep.
Drowsiness increases a driver's crash risk by at least a factor of four, and drowsy driving may be significantly underreported in police crash investigations, the researchers concluded.
Cell phones were the most common cause of distraction, but they were not nearly as dangerous as reaching for an object rolling around in the back seat, which increased risk by a factor of nine.
"Advanced technology like the next generation of adaptive cruise control, blind spot detection and lane departure warming can help drivers refocus on proper vehicle operation before encountering a potential accident situation," Derrick Zechmair, Siemens VDO vice president-North American Restraint Systems, Safety Electronics, tells Ward's.
To quote the great philosopher Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Today's safety technology is saving our lives. Hopefully tomorrow's technology will save us from ourselves.
PHOTO (COLOR): An estimated 80% of crashes are preceded by driver inattention.
Works Cited
Querna, Betsy. "Big and Heavy Isn't Necessarily Safer." U.S. News & World Report 140.2 (16 Jan. 2006): 68-68. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=19368379&site=ehost-live>.
Parents shopping for sport utility vehicles with an eye toward their kids' safety may want to think again. A new study in the journal Pediatrics found that, even though most SUVs are heavier than most passenger cars, that potential benefit is offset by an increased risk of rollover. In the study of thousands of crashes involving children, SUVs were more than twice as apt to roll over, and children in any kind of crash were just as likely to be injured in SUVs as in cars. "The assumption that SUVs must be better because they're bigger is not necessarily true," says coauthor Dennis Durbin, a pediatric emergency physician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Regardless of what you drive, he says, the most important precaution a parent can take is to properly buckle the kids in--unrestrained children were 25 times as likely to get hurt in an SUV rollover as those with their seat belts on--and put them in the back seat until age 13.
Works Cited
Weat, Evan. "the seatbelts on the bus go click! click! click!." Indianapolis Monthly 29.1 (Sep. 2005): 136-472. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.
Of the thousands of Hoosier kids who ride school buses, the overwhelming majority make it home every day, on time and in one piece. It's a phenomenon most parents take for granted. Pete Baxter, state director of the Division of School Transportation Safety and Emergency Planning, says, "People tend to think of school buses in the same way as garbage trucks: They show up, pick up their load, then take it away." And for the most part, that's exactly how it works. No wonder, then, that the big yellow school bus is a benign icon in American culture, personified in kiddie books and lampooned in movies about high-school hijinks. Deliberate and lumbering, it is a haven from the arbitrary dangers that seldom touch children and are yet never far off. The school bus, it seems, is always there, taking kids to a safe place.
Statistics bear out the secure feeling that school buses provide. Of the roughly 25 million U.S. students who don't ride the bus during normal school-travel hours — who ride in a car, take a city bus, walk — nearly 800 are killed. By comparison, of the roughly 25 million children who ride school buses each year, on average, only about 10 are killed. In Indiana, the numbers are even more remarkable: As far as most authorities can recall, only two Hoosiers have been killed on school buses since 1975; according to federal statistics, only one has died in the past decade. Schoolbus-passenger deaths are so infrequent that fatality figures are less statistics than statistical anomalies.
Often touted as the ultimate gauge of bus safety, this by-the-numbers story has a mixed moral. To those in the school-transportation industry, the statistics bespeak a remarkable success: how officials at nearly every level of government transformed buses from deathtraps to the safest vehicles on the road. To safety advocates, on the other hand, even one child's death is one too many, and no fatality figure greater than zero should satisfy. Yet both readings of passenger fatalities overlook the fact that in Indiana and in the United States more children die near the school bus than on it — and that death, though the worst, isn't the only terrible fate to befall kids on the bus.
April 29, 1996: A teenager in northern Indiana becomes a national hero when he brings his school bus to a stop after it veers off the road, strikes a concrete abutment, and nearly flies off a bridge and plunges into a creek. The driver, who'd suffered a seizure and blacked out, had failed to report his condition to school officials.
October 31, 1996: A girl on a Pike Township school bus confronts a fellow rider who's rolling a joint. He lunges at her with a razor blade, slashing her hand as she moves to shield her face.
August 24, 1998: A former bus driver in Columbus is arrested after offering to pay a teenage boy on his route to clean the bus, then pulling the bus to the side of the road and molesting him.
January 24, 2000: A mother in Westfield receives a phone call from a stranger who says he has her 7-year-old daughter. The man says he found the girl standing alone at a rural intersection, crying and shivering in the minus-4-degree wind chill. Turns out she had been asleep on the bus when it dropped off her classmates at school, and the driver had failed to check the seats after parking the bus at his house. The girl had awoken, wandered to the side of the road, and was trying to find her way home, some three miles away.
April 21, 2000: Paramedics find a Carmel Clay Schools driver sitting behind the wheel of an idling school bus. He registers a blood-alcohol level of 0.485, nearly five times the then-legal limit. Students on his route later report that he'd been weaving, had run over a median on U.S. 31, had driven west in an eastbound lane of 116th Street, and had blown through three stop signs and a red light. He had eventually stopped when he grew too ill to continue driving.
March 1, 2001: A 6-year-old Indianapolis girl boards a school bus with a handgun she found in a dresser in her parents' bedroom. When her older sister takes the gun away, the safety is off and there's a bullet in the chamber.
August 23, 2001: On the first day of classes at Indianapolis Public Schools, a gun battle breaks out on the near-north side, and stray bullets smash into the front of a school bus. (On numerous occasions in the past decade, projectiles ranging from bullets to BBs to flying wrenches have crashed through Indianapolis schoolbus windows.)
During roughly the same time span in which these events occurred, all kinds of bad stuff was happening to kids outside their school buses as well. While at or near bus stops, numerous children in Indiana were assaulted or abducted by adults. At least one was murdered. At least two were raped. At least one was viciously attacked by dogs. A middle-schooler was hospitalized with a collapsed lung after a fellow student stabbed him three times in the back. Three teenagers were robbed of their sneakers at gunpoint. An untold number of children were stalked, harassed or indecently propositioned by strangers. Two girls were flashed by a pervert with a history of committing sex crimes. At least 10 children in central Indiana were struck by passing traffic in what some transportation officials wryly call "the death zone" — the area where students get on and off the bus — or in the vicinity of their bus stops. At least five more were struck, run over or dragged by school buses. And as if all these perils weren't enough, the state now requires bus drivers to watch a video warning them that school buses are an attractive target for terrorists. "Do you think a terrorist might think about using a school bus as a vehicle bomb some day?" asks the narrator. "If it hasn't crossed their mind already." The video cuts to a wide shot of a bus sitting in the middle of an empty field. Without warning, it explodes in a ball of flames.
Yet, when it comes to the various dangers associated with buses, it is the broken glass and mangled steel of crashes that seem to capture the public's interest. "School buses are an emotional tagline for the news," says Cal LeMon, author of Unreported Miracles: What You Probably Do Not Know About Your Child's School Bus. "But the only time I see them on TV is when they're upside down." While random occurrences such as childmolestation and kids stabbing one another are scary, parents can often dismiss them as things that happen to other people's kids. But the idea that every child who rides a bus might be in danger, that some future tragedy might occur because of simple negligence, is truly terrifying. So even though children rarely die in bus crashes, whenever a bus does get into an accident — as more than 800 did in Indiana last year — the media, the public and parents all seem to ask the same question: When young children are required by law to ride in special safety seats, when billboards tell drivers to "click it or ticket," when federal law requires all cars to be manufactured with restraints, why in the world don't school buses have seatbelts?
At the Center for Advanced Product Evaluation, IMMI's state-of-the-art research facility in Westfield, a small room connected to the main testing floor houses a "family" of anthropomorphic test devices, better known as crash-test dummies. Costing upwards of $90,000 apiece, they are anatomical human proxies, similar to the dummies you see on TV commercials but even more lifelike. They have faces, limbs and joints. They have intricately detailed vertebrae and heavy skulls. They have "skin" — vinyl sheathing that covers metallic ribcages. They wear sweatsuits and sneakers. They come in all sizes and weights, proportioned to match typical people of various ages and both genders. In engineering terms, they exhibit biofidelity. "When I first started working with them, I tried to be kind of gentle," says Seth Biddle, a burly calibration technician. "You can kind of see some of them as children." As he talks, he takes a screwdriver to a childlike dummy that's sitting upright on a stainless-steel table, its legs dangling over the edge, and removes its face.
IMMI researchers wanted to prove that the collision protection currently offered by school buses was inadequate. So they wired the dummies and taped yellow-and-black targets on their heads. Engineers then placed them in real school buses, some wearing IMMI-designed seatbelts, others unrestrained, and sent them traveling 30 miles per hour down an 800-foot track. Waiting at the end was a 3-inch steel plate mounted on a towering hunk of concrete and rebar weighing 1.5 million pounds; to ensure that the barrier could withstand the impact of such large vehicles, the facility's designers had constructed it to be three times as massive below ground as above. All together, say IMMI engineers, the structure contains enough concrete for more than a mile of sidewalk and weighs more than two fully loaded 747s. (A cup of coffee placed atop the barrier during one crash test didn't even ripple, they say.) In a specially designed "rollover cabinet," engineers tipped other buses to 90 degrees. They crashed one school bus into the back of another. They crashed a "bullet vehicle" — a semi cab — into the side of a bus. They've crashed more buses, boasts James Johnson, head of the project, than the rest of the auto-safety industry and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) combined. During the crashes, researchers monitored the dummies via built-in sensors and visual-imaging devices that followed the yellow-and-black targets on their heads. (The Center for Advanced Product Evaluation has its own generator; the electricity needed to power its equipment, if drawn from the city utility, would cause brownouts in Westfield.)
IMMI researchers studied the data and came to one conclusion: Dummies wearing seatbelts came out of bus crashes in better shape than their unbuckled counterparts.
But you don't need to understand sophisticated crash data to come to the same conclusion. All that's required is a look at the dummies. The ones that have smooth faces and look virtually new are the ones that wore seatbelts during the tests. The others-scuffed, beaten-up, chunks of rubber gouged from their faces-were sitting in the same beltless bus seats that your kids, if they're among the nearly 800,000 Indiana children who ride a school bus, probably sit in every day.
In the parlance of school-transportation safety, large yellow buses fall into two categories: pre-1977 and post-1977. Pre-1977 buses are the type your parents rode to school, the type you probably rode to school. Most of them would be laughable by today's safety standards, if child deaths and injuries were something to laugh about. By and large, buses built before 1977 were little more than sheet metal bolted to big steel chassis, with four wheels and a diesel motor. Seats might as well have been park benches; children thrown into the back of a seat in even minor collisions were prone to losing teeth when their faces slammed into exposed steel bars-unless they flew over the seats altogether. In the undercarriage, large fuel tanks were often exposed to whatever hazards the bus might encounter on the road. In severe collisions, buses often disintegrated or collapsed, and children were often ejected or crushed. Subjecting a child to a traffic accident in most pre-1977 buses was like placing an egg in a toolbox full of wrenches and gasoline, then throwing it down a flight of stairs and hoping it came out unbroken.
Thanks in part to Ralph Nader, who in the 1960s began calling substandard school buses "cookie-cutter buses," the auto-safety revolution that transformed car manufacturing was, by the late '60s, starting to influence the school-bus industry. In 1967, UCLA researchers conducted some of the first scientific crash tests on school buses, and, not surprisingly, the buses performed horribly. The findings caught the attention of federal regulators, and in 1972 NHTSA began studying school-transportation safety in preparation for new regulations that would govern the manufacture of all buses.
The NHTSA regulations released in 1977 as part of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards revolutionized school-bus design. All new buses would have increased joint strength, making them less likely to tear apart in accidents. They would have fuel-system integrity, making them less vulnerable to explosions and fires. Bus roofs would be reinforced so as not to collapse in rollovers. New mirror systems would make it easier for drivers to see children walking or standing near the bus.
But the most significant development to emerge in 1977 was "compartmentalization," which, more than any of the other new regulations, acknowledged the fragility of schoolbus cargo. Originally introduced by the UCLA researchers, the premise, again, was that children are like eggs: They can take a bit of banging around without breaking, but only if you've put them in a good container. Regulators determined that the insides of school buses should, like egg cartons, have snug little protective cells for each passenger. Seats were moved closer together, and seat anchors were better secured. Seatbacks were raised. Padding was added, and seat frames were reengineered to absorb the blow of children being thrown forward; instead of being rigid, the joints would give slightly on impact. (It's worth noting that, unlike egg cartons, the padded cells in these new buses offered protection in only two directions: straight ahead and behind.)
The beauty of compartmentalization was its simplicity: With a few modifications, manufacturers could make bus interiors dramatically safer. And because the system was one of "passive" restraint, children would be protected without having to do anything but sit in their seats as they always had. School-bus culture, at least at the level of passengers and drivers, did not change one bit, and yet, nearly 30 years after the 1977 standards went into effect, passenger fatalities have plummeted. Despite being virtually invisible to all but those whose jobs it is to notice, compartmentalization has been a smashing success.
It has generally taken tragedy on a grand scale to spur further safety improvements. The advances of 1977 succeeded in keeping kids in their seats during collisions, but they failed to make it any easier to escape those seats when necessary. The most notorious example of such a need is now known simply as the Kentucky School Bus Crash, which occurred in 1988, when a church group from an exurb of Louisville traveled to King's Island on a yellow school bus manufactured just before the 1977 NHTSA guidelines went into effect. (Because the 1977 standards applied only to new buses, thousands of the old models remained in service; Indiana's last pre-1977 school bus was retired in 1999). A drunk driver in a pickup truck struck the bus on a stretch of interstate near Carrollton, Kentucky, sparking an inferno that engulfed the bus and its passengers. It was arguably the worst disaster in school-bus history: 26 children and one adult were burned alive partly because a narrow aisle and inadequate escape exits — areas neglected by the 1977 regulations — prevented them from getting off. The following year, a Coke truck collided with a school bus in Alton, Texas, shoving it off the road and into a pit of water. Twenty-one children drowned when they were unable to escape the submerged vehicle. Not long after, NHTSA upgraded federal safety standards for large school buses to include provisions requiring push-out windows, side-exit doors and roof exits.
Another of the most high-profile crashes in U.S. history occurred in 1995 when a commuter train in Fox River Grove, Illinois struck the rear-left side of a bus, killing seven. That accident helped prompt the introduction of a "noise-suppression" switch that many bus drivers can now activate at railroad crossings to make it easier to hear oncoming trains; Indiana law will soon require such a switch on most buses. (Trains are the archenemy of school buses. In the past 30 years, they've been involved in no less than 17 fatal bus crashes nationwide; one of Indiana's rare passenger fatalities was a driver in Madison whose bus was hit by a train.)
WITH ALL THE IMPROVEMENTS IN
bus safety over the years, the absence of the seatbelt, the most celebrated of all automotive-safety features, would seem a glaring oversight. (In an informal, unscientific poll conducted for this article, 58 of 66 local parents said school buses should have lap/shoulder belts; 39 of 49 non-parents agreed.) As far back as the 1960s, when the federal government required all new cars to come equipped with seatbelts, the UCLA team that urged improved collision protection for school buses also recommended the addition of "active" safely restraints. But with seatbelt usage still not a habit among most of the American public, NHTSA limited its recommendation to compartmentalization, which required no behavior modification in users. Engineers consoled themselves with the rationale that large school buses differ from cars so much as to make seatbelts virtually superfluous. Because of their far superior mass — school buses can weigh more than 20,000 pounds fully loaded — they are essentially tanks without guns, impervious to the collision forces of all but the largest vehicles. "Size and mass equate to protection," says state official Baxter. "If you're going to be in a crash, would you rather be in a Yugo or a Hummer?"
It didn't help restraint proponents that when the federal government revisited the issue in the late '80s, no major school-bus tragedies had done for restraints what the Kentucky crash did for emergency exits. National seatbelt advocates, whose numbers and vociferousness were by then growing, couldn't point convincingly to a single event in which school-bus passengers, had they been strapped in, wouldn't have died. Accident reports showed that in most rollovers — the accidents in which restraints were thought to be most beneficial — children, while tossed around violently, tended to receive little more than bumps and bruises. "Unfortunately for the cause of seatbelts, kids are very resilient," says Alan Ross of the National Coalition for School Bus Safety. "No matter how you break their bones, they tend to bounce back and survive." Other studies showed that children wearing lap belts — lap/shoulder restraints would not be available on buses for another decade — might actually suffer head and neck injuries during collisions. And one can argue that if seatbelts had been in use during the "blockbuster" crashes of Carrolton, Alton and Fox River Grove, even more children would have been trapped, unable to escape the fire, flood and locomotive that killed their companions. Nevertheless, by the early 1990s legislation requiring lap belts on school buses was popping up in statehouses across the country. Safety advocates in New York, New Jersey and Florida managed to get laws passed that remain in effect today.
Indiana, says Baxter, "historically has done some progressive things with school-bus safety." As long ago as 1917, the state had laws on the books mandating that bus drivers show "good moral character" and "be experienced in the handling of teams or the driving of automobiles depending on which is used." (Of course, it wasn't until 2003 that state legislators got around to proposing a law banning smoking on school buses.) But Michael Dvorak, a former state representative from Granger, had no such luck getting seatbelts mandated. Several times in the late '80s and early '90s, he proposed legislation, and in 1993 he even managed to shepherd a lap-belt bill through the House, but it died in the Senate. To Dvorak's recollection, the Indiana School Boards Association and other groups thought the added cost of equipping buses with belts — up to $2,000 per bus — was unwarranted. More opponents bristled at government regulation. "Most of the resistance was from people who were for civil liberties," he says. "In Indiana we don't like being mandated to do anything by Indianapolis." The state has seen no significant, organized push for bus seatbelts since.
IMMI HAS MADE A PRACTICE OF
anticipating government regulations. Before the feds even got around to requiring that new cars be equipped with seatbelts, IMMI — then known as Auto Safe — was making them. Starting in 1961, in a small office in downtown Indianapolis, the forward-thinking company produced lap belts for cars that came from the factory without them; weekend mechanics could buy the aftermarket restraints in auto-parts stores. And in the early '80s, IMMI was the first company to offer lap/shoulder belts for heavy trucks, and soon became the nation's largest supplier. To keep up with production, the company relocated to its current home, a large, modern facility near Westfield High School.
IMMI's entree into the world of school-bus seatbelts was in large part a matter of being in the right industry at the right time. Although not required to outfit school buses with passenger restraints, most bus manufacturers nevertheless equipped drivers' seats with the same IMMI lap/shoulder belts (sometimes called three-point harnesses) used in heavy trucks. Meanwhile, as legislators across the country debated mandating such belts on buses, IMMI was also selling school-bus lap belts in the few states where they were required (the company has sold more than a million in New York alone). Executives at IMMI saw a new opportunity: If the safety benefits of lap belts were dubious, why not offer superior lap/shoulder restraints of the sort used by school-bus drivers?
Bus manufacturers' response to IMMI's sales pitch was lukewarm at best. Since the compartmentalization standards of 1977, they had been required to offer passive restraints — essentially, seats that soften the blow when kids are pitched forward. Accordingly, bus-seat frames had been designed to bend when force was applied from behind. But engineers found that if a child was strapped to the seat in a collision, his weight would pull the whole seat-back forward — leaving the child seated behind him with no seatback to cushion his blow if he happened not to be wearing a seatbelt himself.
Recognizing that "the seat would fold up like a sandwich," as IMMI manager and engineer Steve Wallen puts it, IMMI recommended that bus-makers redesign their seats to accommodate lap/shoulder belts. Not surprisingly, the manufacturers, whose seats were already in compliance with federal standards demurred.
Undaunted, IMMI set out to design new seats themselves. The task fell to the company's SafeGuard division, already a leading supplier of child-safety seats for autos. Eventually, engineers came up with "smart frame" technology, a virtual seat within a seat: An outer frame complies with federal passive-restraint standards, while a smaller, inner frame carries the lap/shoulder hardware and acts independently of the larger frame. In a headon collision, though a buckled child pulls part of the seat forward, the frame remains in place to offer passive protection to a potentially unbuckled child in the next row back.
In the late 1990s, as IMMI engineers crashed huses and tweaked their "smart frame" design, NHTSA, at the direction of Congress, began a review of existing school-bus safety standards. Topping the agenda were lap belts and the newly available lap/shoulder belts that IMMI had designed. (IMMI's only notable lap/shoulder belt competitor, the smaller Ohio-based C.E. White Co., also made a three-point restraint system available for government testing.) Over the course of four years, NHTSA tested seatbelt technology and studied accident reports.
Observers widely anticipated another 1977-type revolution in school-bus safety. Legislators in California, where passage of a lap-belt law had once seemed inevitable, now refocused their efforts on lap/shoulder belts in anticipation of new federal standards. "California is known for sailing the uncharted waters of automotive safety," says Michael Martin of the National Association for Pupil Transportation: Just months before NHTSA released School Bus Safety: Crashworthiness Research in 2002, the Golden State finalized legislation requiring all new large buses purchased after July 1, 2005 to be fully equipped with three-point harnesses. This year, California saw a pre-July 1 bus-buying spree, as school transportation directors rushed to build up their fleets before the new law took effect.
But instead of launching a safety revolution, the 2002 report left much of the school-bus industry spinning its wheels. Given all the negative studies researchers had issued in the past, it came as no surprise when NHTSA reported that "lap belts appear to have little, if any, benefit in reducing serious-to-fatal injuries in severe frontal crashes. On the contrary, lap belts could increase the incidence of serious neck injuries and possibly abdominal injury among young passengers." What did come as a surprise was NHTSA's position on lap/shoulder belts — a position that, in Martin's words, was "clear in its ambiguity."
If three-point harnesses enjoyed "100 percent proper use," read the report, the number of child fatalities in frontal collisions might be reduced by one per year. A non-specified number of fatalities caused by other crash scenarios might also be avoided. Charles Hott, a NHTSA safety engineer who helped develop the 2002 Crashworthiness report, says that in most of the fatal crashes he studied, deaths were caused by "severe intrusions" in "un-survivable" crash situations. In other words, children sitting right at the point of impact in serious collisions were the ones who ended up dead. Three-point harnesses, Hott says, might eliminate the "occasional oddball ejection." But according to the report, "Other considerations, such as increased capital costs, reduced seating capacities, and other unintended consequences associated with lap/shoulder belts could result in more children seeking alternative means of traveling to and from school. Given that school buses are the safest way to and from school, even the smallest reduction in the number of bus riders could result in more children being killed or injured when using alternative forms of transportation." Rather than mandate lap/shoulder belts, NHTSA announced that it would establish standards for manufacturers who might voluntarily install them.
Although seatbelt supporters were less than thrilled by the report, many seized on the conclusion that lap/shoulder belts might save one life per year as ammunition for their cause. "We still feel restraints are absolutely essential," says Ross. "Compartmentalization just does not do enough." He points out that while the report focuses on fatalities, it says very little about how lap/shoulder belts might reduce serious injury — which, thanks to spotty reporting and state-to-state variances in accounting procedures, remains a gray area in bus safety. Ross contends that serious school-bus injuries number more than 3,000 per year; the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation argues that in the approximately 7,000 injury-causing bus crashes each year, most students suffer only "minor In moderate injuries"
IMMI's Johnson says that regardless of inconsistent statistics, his company's crashtesting should provide all the evidence needed to standardize lap/shoulder belts. "Compartmentalization did a very good job in frontal collisions-surprisingly well, considering what a violent event that is," he says. "It wasn't surprising, however, that Compartmentalization didn't do so well in rollovers and side impacts. It's really a common-sense issue. Historically, in every vehicle where seatbelts were introduced, injuries have been reduced by 45 percent"
Charlie Gauthier of the NASDPTS remains unconvinced. "I know this sounds harsh, but there are nominal values the federal government places on each life and each serious injury," he says. "NHTSA decided not to mandate seathelts because the benefits don't justify the cost in dollars. What safety advocates are upset about is the sheer economics of life." Indeed, as a group and as a rule, school transportation directors, always mindful of tight budgets, balk at any potentially unfunded mandate, even if they acknowledge some limited safety benefits of restraints. A new bus equipped with SafeGuard seats costs up to $10,000 more than a bus with standard seats; to retrofit an existing bus with the seats also costs at least $10,000. Considering that more kids die outside buses than on them, many argue that such money might be better spent on trying to prevent children from being run over. (As if to underscore the point, one bus driver interviewed for this story admitted that earlier in the morning she had attended a memorial service for a woman she had backed over and killed in a school parking lot.)
Although officials at IMMI attempt to put a positive spin on the Crashworthiness report, they were doubtless disappointed by the overall conclusion. With more than $3 million invested in the development and testing of the seatbelts — "crashing school buses is expensive," says engineer Wallen — the company was poised to be the go-to supplier when school districts across the nation scrambled to comply with the anticipated new regulations. Now, if IMMI wants its seatbelts on every school bus in America, it's going to have to market the hell out of them — a challenge it's approaching with missionary zeal. "The bus seatbelts are not a big-money order for us right now," says Wallen. "But we think this is the right thing to do."
DUMMIES CAN TELL YOU HOW
lifeless bodies respond to crash scenarios. But they can't simulate the effects of crash forces on human tissue (for that, engineers use cadavers, though researchers in Germany caused an uproar in the early 1990s when it was discovered that they'd used child cadavers in crash tests). Nor can they tell you how real, live kids — unpredictable, willful, squirmy — are going to behave. And so the big question, the question that has always loomed over the school-bus seatbelt debate, is: Will kids wear them?
When IMMI completed its design for the SafeGuard bus seat, it needed a test market. Public-school systems around Indianapolis, invited to participate in a pilot program with the seats, declined. IMMI kept looking. And of the local private schools, Heritage Christian — which enrolls children from kindergarten through 12th grade — was one of the few large enough to have its own bus fleet. "I guess they thought working with a private Christian school allowed them more liberties and allowances than working with the bureaucracy of a public school," says Janice Gatliff, a former bus driver and assistant transportation director at the school. "For us, it was like the answer to a prayer, because our fleet happened to be a bus short."
It likely didn't hurt that IMMI and Heritage Christian share a similar ideology. IMMI bills itself as a Christian company; the entrance to its corporate headquarters is adorned with Scripture, a coffee table in the lobby is stacked with Christian-themed inspirational books, and a plaque in one conference room admonishes employees to "Honor God." Several IMMI higher-ups, says engineer Johnson, had "social" contacts with Heritage Christian administrators, and children of a top IMMI executive currently attend the school.
In 2002, Heritage Christian became the first school in America to run a bus fully equipped with lap/shoulder belts. IMMI researchers wanted to know how the belts held up to daily use, if the kids used them properly and could figure out how to adjust them, whether they'd actually put them on and keep them on, whether they'd beat one another with them, whether moms and dads would have any reason to complain.
Aside from a few children griping to their parents that the shoulder straps irritated their necks, the program was, by all accounts, a success, and as a show of gratitude, IMMI donated the test bus to the school. So pleased, in turn, were Heritage Christian administrators that they decided to retrofit eight buses with SafeGuard seats in time for the 2004-2005 school year, making the fleet the largest of its kind in the country.
In the year that Heritage Christian's drivers have operated buses with seatbelts, they've learned a few things. In the beginning, they had to take creative steps to keep kids in their restraints, such as bribing them with candy or pulling over and refusing to drive until everyone buckled up. Young children, most of whom had been riding in child-safety seats their whole lives, fairly quickly made a habit of strapping themselves in. But the older the passenger, the more difficult it is to get him to wear a seatbelt (teenage drivers ages 16 to 19 also have the lowest seatbelt-usage rate — 30 percent — in cars). "In high school, it's already not cool to ride the bus," says driver Cathy Mellinger. "Then you add seatbelts, and that's it." Or, as one Heritage Christian sophomore says, "They're stupid and painful."
Fortunately, Heritage Christian drivers haven't had to learn how well the seatbelts perform in crashes. But there are other benefits, they say. Student behavior has improved. The buses are quieter because it's harder for kids to talk to one another across the seats and aisles. And drivers have fewer distractions from students while they're on the road. All of these factors are main selling points in IMMI's marketing.
IMMI also notes that making children wear seatbelts on the bus reinforces the safety habit in other types of vehicles — a theory that sounds nice but is difficult, if not impossible, to prove. Anecdotal evidence suggests the correlation is not as strong as advertised. Research for this story included rides on local school buses — some with seatbelts, as at Heritage Christian, and many without, as at public township schools. One spiky-haired teenager on a Franklin Township bus, asked how he would feel about having to wear a seatbelt, said, "It would suck." However, he confirmed that he always wears a belt when riding in a car. Indeed, all the school-bus passengers interviewed, on buses with and without restraints, thought having harnesses on the bus either sucked or would suck. Yet all accepted as a matter of course that, in automobiles, they buckle up.
Whatever the ancillary benefits of restraints, most bus drivers and school transportation directors outside of Heritage Christian remain skeptical. In a recent national survey in School Bus Fleet magazine, 72 percent of drivers said they opposed seatbelts (good news, says an IMMI spokesperson, explaining that a few years ago the number would have been closer to 99 percent). Susie Fields, supervisor of transportation for Franklin Township schools, speaks for many of her colleagues when she says, "Seatbelts are something that would just get in the way — God knows, a school-bus driver has a thousand other things to attend to." Sandy Rushton, one of Fields' drivers, says, "I wouldn't be able to tell if a kid in the back was wearing a seatbelt or not-don't make me responsible for what's going on back there."
In 2000, a group of nine Avon drivers rode a single bus home after dropping off several busloads of students at band camp. En route, the bus ran off the road and rolled over three times, tossing the drivers around the inside of the vehicle like rag dolls. Though no one was killed, one of the passengers, veteran bus driver Marcia Moyer, wound up crumpled in the middle of the bus with torn abdomen muscles and compression fractures in her back. Yet not even that episode changed her mind about seatbelts. "Sure, we had damage that we might not have if we'd been wearing seatbelts," she says. "But I don't know if we would have been safer in other respects. Somebody would have had to get us out of those belts while we were upside down."
AS EARLY AS NEXT YEAR, NHTSA
is expected to release a new set of federal standards for the manufacture and installation of lap/shoulder belts for school buses. But the belts themselves will still be optional. In the meantime, NHTSA's 2002 report and the persistent humbuggery of budget-minded school transportation officials appear to have slowed the political momentum that seatbelt supporters seemed to enjoy in the early 1990s. True, the governor of Missouri (where a recent crash left several passengers injured) has called for a task force to review "whether requiring seatbelts in school buses would prove effective in reducing fatalities and injuries in school transportation-related incidents." And true, proposals for legislation can be found in a handful of states at any given time. But in no state does passage of such legislation appear imminent. Even Louisiana, which passed a law similar to California's, delayed establishing a deadline pending the release of the 2002 Crash-worthiness report; implementation of the law is now in limbo.
While several medical associations and child-safety groups officially support the seatbelt cause, it lacks a unified, well-funded lobby to push for legislation. Ross, of the National Coalition for School Bus Safety, is the most vocal national advocate, but he's a full-time dentist in Connecticut who heads his campaign from home. "The only viable advocacy organization has been mine, and right now I'm rushing back to my office to fix people's teeth," he says. Though the group has members in Indiana, he says, none is willing to become a local spokesperson.
In the absence of a strong political movement or public-awareness campaign, it's essentially up to IMMI not only to sell its products, but to convince parents to call local school boards and demand that they buy SafeGuard seats for their buses. The company has run national TV spots contrasting unruly, unbuckled kids with their well-behaved, seatbelted counterparts — many of the latter from Heritage Christian. In California, promotional buses crisscross the state advertising "the safest school-bus seat in the world." On IMMI's Web site, interested parents can request a free promotional video that opens with images of crash-test dummies being hurled around inside buses and grainy black-and-white footage of a real rollover in Ohio — all set to a soundtrack of ominous minor chords. When happy children are shown wearing SafeGuard restraints, the music takes a sentimental turn. "If we've learned anything about raising families in this 21st-century America," says the narrator, "we've learned that we all must be vigilant and proactive with regard to any and all threats to the safety of our families."
Already, some 2,000 school buses in 40 states are equipped with SafeGuard seats (incidentally, a school in Bloomington was the first in the nation to buy them), and a public-school system in Indianapolis — IMMI won't say which — placed an order for the seats in time to begin using them this school year. "We think lap/ shoulder belts will sweep across the country in the next 10 years," says IMMFs Johnson. "NHTSA is the caboose on this train now."
"Historically," adds Johnson, "litigation has driven some safety improvements. But we hope that's not the case here, because it means a child has already been hurt." In fact, a child has been hurt. In 2003,16-year-old Raul Garcia was on a Perry Township school bus when the driver swerved to avoid a wounded raccoon in the road. The side of the bus swiped a tree. Garcia, said to be mentally challenged, leaned out the window to see what was going on, and the bus pinned his head against the tree, killing him instantly. He is believed to be only the second person to die from a collision on an Indiana school bus in 30 years, and the first child to die for as long as anyone seems to remember.
Haul's mother, Irma Garcia, is suing the bus driver, the city, the county, the state and the school district, in part for "failing to provide proper restraints or other equipment which would have prevented Raul, a student with diminished capacity, from sticking his head out of the window."
"There is no logical reason not to mandate restraints on school buses," says Garcia's attorney, Robert York. "In Indiana we have recognized that restraints in vehicles are important, and this event could happen again. But in order to get laws changed, it seems like a tragedy has to happen."
Still, it looks as though it will take more than this particular tragedy to get a restraint measure in Indiana. General Assembly action is not needed to make seatbelts the law; the State School Bus Committee has authority to decide what equipment school buses are required to have. "Right now, we're in a holding pattern waiting for the federal government," says state official Baxter. When local transportation directors ask if they should retrofit their buses with SafeGuard seats, he tells them no. If they say they want to order new buses with factory-installed seatbelts, he shrugs. "We watch what occurs nationally and try to be proactive," he says. "I would like to think we're not just sitting around reacting to major crashes. But on the state level, there is just no debate about this."
IMMI wanted to prove that the collision protection offered by school buses was inadequate. Engineers placed crash-test dummies in buses, some wearing seatbelts, others unrestrained, and sent them traveling 30 mph down an 800-foot track.
Research for this story included rides on local school buses — some with seatbelts and many without. One spiky-haired teenager on a Franklin Township bus. asked how he would feel about having to wear a seatbelt, said, "It would suck."
"Seatbelts are just something that would get in the way, says transportation director Susie Fields.
Works Cited
Murphy, Tom. "Inverted Seat Belts." Ward's Auto World 41 (02 Mar. 2005): 6-8. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=16521221&site=ehost-live>.
Inverted Seat Belts
Section: SafetyTwo Lincoln concept cars have them. Is there a market?
At least one generation of drivers has the procedure ingrained in their psyche: Climb behind the wheel and reach with your right hand over your left shoulder for the seatbelt, pulling it to a buckle near your right hip.
How would drivers in the future react if seatbelts were anchored over their right shoulder and required buckling alongside, their left hip?
In recent years, Ford Motor Co. has unveiled two concept cars (the Lincoln Mark X and Continental) with first-rowseatbelts configured in this manner.
The subtle design-change has drawn little attention. Ford did not even mention the inverted seatbelts in the press release issued for the Mark X concept, which debuted it the 2004 North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
But some safety advocates say inverted seatbelts make sense as curtain airbags gain popularity. On a driver-side impact, the curtain airbag will prevent the driver from striking his head on the side window. On a passenger-side impact, however, current 3-point seat belts will not prevent the driver's upper body from lurching to the right, potentially striking his passenger.
Reversing the anchoring points for the seatbelts could lessen the severity of injuries in side impacts, assuming the vehicle has curtain airbags.
Seatbelt suppliers say reversing the anchorage points for first-row seatbelts would pose significant structural challenges.
Current configurations allow the seatbelt to be anchored on the vehicle's B-pillar - a rigid portion of the body well suited to handle heavy loads. It attaches to one buckle mounted to the floorplan, below the seat.
With this new concept, the inverted seatbelts could not be anchored to the B-pillar. Instead, they would be integrated into the seat.
And because the center of the vehicle lacks the structure afforded by the B-pillar, a beam in the floor would be necessary for reinforcement to handle the loads in the event of an accident, says Charlie Steffens, director-Safety Systems Technology at seatbelt specialist TRW Automotive.
With current conventional seatbelt configurations, the lap belt carries 60+ACU- of the load, while the shoulder belt carries the remaining 40+ACU-, Steffens says.
Despite Structural challenge's, Steffens says auto makers are discussing inverted seatbelts because of the arrival of curtain airbags. The current B-pillar anchoring point often interferes with the curtain airbag when deployed, so airbag designers such as TRW must design the bag to avoid the belt. Reversing the anchoring points would eliminate the problem, Steffens says.
TRW has produced prototypes with inverted seatbelts two or three times in the past for auto makers - with one project dating back to 1978. Those programs, Steffens says, were scuttled due to the structural challenges associated with seat-mounted belts.
Seat-mounted belts have had varying degrees of success in the U.S. marketplace. General Motors Corp. uses them for its GMT800 fullsize pickups and SUVs.
"A lot of times those belts are less compliant due to the fixed shoulder point" Steffens says. With taller passengers, the anchorage point on the seat actually is lower than the occupant's shoulder, causing occasional discomfort, he says.
Steffens calls the inverted seatbelt concept a "significant development issue," but he sees no signs from auto makers that such a design will be in production in the U.S. within the next five years. "If it will happen, we'd know," he says.
Chrysler Group and GM representatives say their companies have no plans to pursue inverted seatbelts in production applications. Even Ford says it does not intend to pursue the technology beyond its two recent concept cars.
Reversing the anchoring points creates other potential safety hazards, Steffens says. In a side impact, it is conceivable the buckle could strike the occupant. Or the buckle could be crushed or inaccessible to an occupant who is trying desperately to get out of a car after a collision.
"With it close to the door, ingress and egress is a problem," Steffens says. Plus, locating the buckle close to the door creates the possibility that occupants will sit on it, potentially damaging the buckle.
Autoliv North America, TRW's chief rival in the passenger restraint market, says it also is working on inverted 3-point seatbelts, as well as a 5-point belt to maximize occupant safety.
Autoliv calls its concept the "3+2-Point" belt, which is similar to the restraints used in race cars. Once the traditional 3-point belt is fastened, the occupant would fasten the additional 2-point belt, preventing the occupant from lurching from side to side in the event of a side impact or rollover.
The supplier, however, has no production contracts yet for the 3+2-Point belt system.
Is the overall concept of inverted seatbelts likely to move forward?
"It depends how much the design studio wants to spend," says TRW's Steffens. "There's a question whether it's better in a rollover situation - I'm not sure there's a real answer to that. But if a car is hit on the opposite side, having the belt in the middle of the car might be better