Seat Belt Laws on Buses – Yes
School busses and city busses alike should have seatbelts, especially for children. How it is that children need to ride in booster seats until five-eight years old and they can ride on a school bus with nothing? How does that fly, someone tell me, because I just don't get it. Don't schools want to keep their children safe in transit? Or is this just about cutting corners and saving money in the budget for nonsense?
So the idea might be that school buses are large and yellow and easy to see. Because they are large they provide more protection for the child. Not true. Every year buses around the country are in accidents with some fatalities. Would you like to explain to a parent that they lost a child on the way to/from school? Would it make them feel any better that the school was too cheap to install seatbelts? No. Bus accidents seem more common lately perhaps due to the increased distances kids are traveling to schools out of area or simply there is more traffic and poorer maintenance on the buses themselves.
A good solution would be to install lapbelts on buses. A lap belt would be affordable to install and would be easy for a young child to put on/off. It would be simple to install three belts to a seat so that seating would not become an issue. Parents do not expect booster seats to be installed nor five point harnesses. We can be realistic. However, don't dare tell us it is safe or ok to send our kids to school riding by the seat of their pants loose on a bench seat.
Belts provide safety in accidents and would also keep children sitting down. How many times do drivers have to yell, "Sit down!". Belts would stop that. A kid would be buckled in and more likely to behave themselves. Kids should not be trading seats throughout the ride or bouncing up and down on the seats. Less distraction for the driver can mean a safer trip to school. Shouldn't that be the goal?
It's time schools and government put our children first and require seatbelts on school buses especially. Otherwise, why do five-year-olds need to ride in booster seats? Really. You can't have it one way and not the other. Schools should not be exempt from the seatbelt law. That is ridiculous. Until this law passes, I will drive my kids to school!
