ALT-8 Should School Buses have and Enforce Seat Belt use – Yes
Absolutely, most definitely, YES YES YES.... All school buses should enforce seat belt use. What makes a bus any less likely to have an accident. Have you been on a school bus? The kids often are unruly, even in the presence of a teacher.
If a school bus is involved in a road traffic accident the bus usually turns over and the kids will be thrown all around the place. Often resulting in fatalities.
Health and safety being a big issue these days, I am very surprised that this has not been made compulsory.
I work for an orthopaedic spinal surgeon and have typed up about various people whose lives have been saved, because they were wearing a seatbelt. Okay they may have suffered a bit of whiplash, but in my minds eye, I would have rathered suffered that injury than to have found myself hurled through the windscreen, which most people who have do this, and are less likely to survive. Even in a coach, you have kids that sit right at the front of the bus because sometimes they suffer with motion sickness and then you get the kids who sit right at the back so that they can play around. Hmmmm I would be very anxious if I was the driver.
I think all school buses and even normal coaches, should be fitted with seat belts. I am unsure why it has not happened yet and when you think that when you travel by air, you are usually strapped into your seat belt. You get into a car and its now law that you wear your seat belt, yet a school bus carrying often 30+ school children who are just left more or less free to wander up and down the isles to talk to their friends are left totally vulnerable and totally exposed, should an accident happen. The whole scene just conjures up so many things for me, that when they travel in their parents car, they will be made to wear a seat belt and yet the parents will think nothing of their child traveling in a school bus unseat belted and left at the mercy of a coach driver. A sort of double standard I think.
At the same time, I am not saying that the driver is reckless but when you are carrying that many kids in a school bus, their lives are entrusted to you to reach school in a fairly safe way and it does not appear to me to be a very sure way that this is being done.
Perhaps its too expensive to fit all the school buses with seat belts, but at the end of the day, whats more important the extra cost of getting seat belts fitted or your childs life for the sake of saving a few extra dollars/pounds?
Perhaps the laws will change in the future, but I am unsure as to why the laws have been left for school kids to travel in school buses so freely as they are now.
If I was a parent I would seriously be lobbying parliament for the implementation of seatbelts in all school buses to be commonplace.
