This article provides a brief overview of school bus travel and school bus safety in Alabama.
ALABAMA SCHOOL BUS TRAVEL
About 51% of public school pupils ride school buses. On a daily basis, 7,341 route school buses carry a total of 376,650 pupils (average = 51 pupils per bus) and travel 457,258 miles (82.3 million miles annually). The estimated annual cost of public school bus travel is about $330 million. Additional school bus information is shown in Table 1.
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Table 1: Snapshot of public-school bus travel
in Alabama (2009-10 data)
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Public school enrollment
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741,115
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Average students per bus
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51
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Regular school buses
Spare school buses
Total school buses
Route buses 10 yrs or less in age
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7,341
2,081
9,422
6.535 (97%)
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Annual cost/transported student
Daily cost/transported student
Daily cost/mile
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$873.93 (FY08)
$4.86 (FY08)
$4.00 (FY08)
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SCHOOL BUS SAFETY
· School buses are large and provide protection because of their visibility, size, and weight. The added protection of compartmentalization was adopted in 1977 under Federal Motor Vehicle Standard 222. Compartmentalization provides crash protection for pupils on large school buses through strong, closely-spaced seats that have energy-absorbing backs to protect them from front- and rear-end crashes.
· The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) reports that school buses are the safest form of transportation to school. Students are six to eight times safer driving to school in a school bus compared to driving to school in their parents’ cars.
· Nationally, three times more pupil deaths take place outside the bus (in loading/unloading zones) than from crashes while riding inside the bus.
· Pupil deaths inside school buses are rare events in Alabama. Since 1977 when major advancements were made to school bus safety, there have been only five fatalities for pupils riding inside of school buses at the time the crash occurred (5 pupil fatalities in 33 years; 4 of which occurred in one tragic crash in Huntsville in 2006).
· The addition of seat belts would make already-safe school buses even safer.
· UTCA conducted a three year project on school bus seat belts for the Alabama State Department of Education, by studying 12 buses equipped with seat belts and overhead digital cameras:
o Based upon 170,000 observations of pupils in pilot project buses, this project established an average seat belt use rate of 61.5%.
o Evaluation of school bus crash data and NHTSA seat belt information showed that installing seat belts would reduce fatalities and injuries to pupils inside of school buses by about 38%.
o A cost effectiveness study was performed using the NHTSA methodology (which is required for any federal rule making like requiring seat belts on buses), with two findings:
1) It would take $32 to 38 million in seat belt costs to produce one “equivalent life saved.”
2) The net benefits from seat belt implementation over one bus fleet life cycle are -$104 million to -$125 million. The benefits are negative because costs are larger than benefits.
Given that seat belts have large, negative economic consequences and that three times as many pupil fatalities occur outside the bus in loading and unloading zones, the UTCA study recommended that school officials first provide safety countermeasures outside of the bus. More lives can be saved there, and can be saved more quickly, than by installing seat belts in school buses.
The material in this article was taken from Summary Report: Alabama School Bus Seat Belt Pilot Project, published as University Transportation Center for Alabama (UTCA) report 07407-1 by the University of Alabama on October 25, 2010.