Safety First

 

DID YOU KNOW....that almost 40% of all the fatalities in and around the loading and unloading of school buses are directly related to the public’s attitude toward a stopped bus? If you see a stopped school bus with the red lights flashing, please stop.

  • School bus transportation infrastructure is the largest system of ground transportation in the United States.
  • 54% of all K-12 students in the U.S. ride school buses to school in the morning.
  • Over 400,000 yellow school buses are on the streets every school day and nearly 25 million students board and deboard these buses every day.
  • The National Transportation Safety Board found there is no positive benefit to seat belts on school buses and that school buses with compartmentalization provide extremely safe transportation to students without the need for seat belts.
  • There are more than 100 Federal, state, provincial and local government agencies and industry associations involved with school transportation in the United States and Canada.

 

As recently as 12 years ago, there were no federal regulations with respect to the licensing requirements for school bus drivers. In 1986 congress passed the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act which required all states to significantly modify their existing licensing, testing and background requirements for all commercial drivers which included school bus drivers. For anyone who wants to drive a school bus (one that seats more than 16 passengers) they must possess a valid Commercial Driver License (CDL).

  • On average, approximately 4% of the yearly cost of educating your child is spent on pupil transportation.
  • The U.S. Department of Transportation requires school buses manufactured after April 1, 1977 to be equipped with a metal cage designed to protect the fuel tank in a direct 30 mph collision by a two ton vehicle.
  • Statistically, the yellow school bus is 172 times safer than a passenger automobile. The National Safety Council calls the school bus the safest form of ground transportation in the United States.


According to the National Safety Council in 1996, here is a comparitive chart showing the risk of death to a passenger in the following transportation modes. This study was conducted in the United States in 1994 on the transportation death rate per 100 million passenger miles traveled.

 

Passenger Automobiles 0.86 (a school bus is 172 times safer)
Railroad Passenger trains 0.04 (a school bus is 8 times safer)
Scheduled airlines 0.04 ( a school bus is 8 times safer)
Transit Buses 0.02 (a school bus is 4 times safer)
Intercity Buses 0.02 (a school bus is 4 times safer)
______
School Buses Less than 0.005


Here is a link to coloring page for younger students from the I-C Corp.
http://www.internationaldelivers.com/site_layout/bus/coloringprogramdetail.asp

Here is a link from the University of North Carolina with a lot of helpful and fun pages.
http://www.ncbussafety.org/NCBUSSAFETY.html