this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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I mean, this is showing the school bus fatalities are insanely low (just 5 total in 37 years in AL) and we should instead use funding to make the more dangerous parts of student transportation safer. This seems like using data to make sure we are making informed choices that will actually increase safety for a larger number of kids instead of wasting resources.
That is precisely what it is.
It's literally a cost benefit analysis showing that while seatbelts make riders safer, they aren't thought to be the best way to make things as safe as possible.
It's not about fire safety.
Ok yeah that makes sense to me. Just when I heard it was because of a "cost benefit analysis " I think of some bigwigs saying "fuck them kids it's too expensive to keep them alive", vs the somewhat surprising reality here. Thanks for sharing.
Yeah, it's a shame that the phrase cost benefit analysis has gotten a bad reputation.
Damn capitalist terminology! Capitalism is so good and then it had to create words to describe its shitty practices.
So the alternative is to not have any safety device. Got it. lmao
Well, it's not "no" safety devices. There are strict rules about how high bus seats have to be, and how rigid so as to limit how far kids can fly in an accident, and to minimize injury when they get fired face first into the seat in front of them.
They also rely on the bus being much taller, and having far more mass than most vehicles, so kids are less likely to get tossed around.
Like it said in the linked document, perfect seatbelt use was anticipated to save two lives a year in the US amongst school children, but spending that money on pick-up and drop-off safety would save more lives, and anything that made busses less available would cost them.
It's largely moot, since more recent data says that it's now worth it, and so the recommendation has shifted to adding them, although it's not mandatory since it's not a super powerful advantage.
It is still about fire safety. Fire fatalities are a part of the cost analysis. The implied cost of averting a fatality far outstrips the value of a statistical life. This is clinical language that's used across government agencies and industries to evaluate the value of a policy or regulation.
It's seriously not about fire safety, the data is right there as well as their rationale. The addition of seatbelts would save lives from bus accidents, but likely increase fatalities from decreased ridership.
NHTSA believes the cost in lives and dollars isn't justified given the data.
Also, it looks like they reevaluated, and now believe that they are worth it given new information.
Yeah, and fatalities due to fire is part of the calculation. You can't possibly think that all of the data they used to reach the determination is in a fucking slide deck, right? These people are smarter than you, don't make the mistake of assuming the opposite.
No, they don't omit seatbelts because of fire safety, and you can tell because their numbers say that including seatbelts would increase the numbers of lives saved.
Who said anything about them being dumb? People said "no seatbelts because fire safety", and a summary of the NHTSA policy rationale saying "seatbelts would save lives, but the money would be better used elsewhere" is a rebuttal to that.
Are you somehow thinking I'm saying the NHTSA doesn't look at fire data?
In other words, divert funding from school bus seatbelts to Safe Routes to Schools.