Winter is still in full force in my area. We are getting roughly 2 substantial doses of   snow storms per week. With all that schools are weary and just do not want to issue any more snow days so you see school busses now battling the forces of black ice and snowy conditions on the road along with the rest of us looking like inexperienced skaters on natures ice skating rink, the roads. Now I realize that most kids are pretty lucky with falls and bruises judging from what I see happening in playgrounds. It is amazing how some kids can just shake it off from a bad fall and continue playing. However, should we be taking such chances with injuries on school busses? If I don’t have my seat belt fastened I get a $55 dollar ticket to pay. Why aren’t there seatbelts on busses?

Regulators say they are safe. Are transport busses in cities safe too? Nearly 24 Million students ride busses daily. Every year a few thousand are injured. An average of 5 children are killed in these crashes each year. That seems to be a very low number of fatalities however you do not want to be the parent of the child who died on that bus this year. United States regulations only require seat belts on school busses under 10,000 pounds. There are only six states in America that require that all school busses should be equipped with seat belts.  Again, we leave too many universal laws from drugs to now seat belts up to individual states to decide.   Congress needs to get off their asses and make a federal law requiring the utmost safety measures for all American children in all states. Someone please earn your pay somewhere in government please!

Manufactures say that school busses have been specifically designed to protect children so seat belts are not needed. The National Transportation Safety Board {NTSB} said that they do not make policy but they do investigate serious school bus crashes and makes safety recommendations. To who are they sending their finding too? No one is making any changes, just compiling reports. Yes we know that a school bus is large and heavy in bright colors driving at slow speeds however the fact that the seat in front of a child is high, with seat cushion materials does not mean we should just expect the child under 50 pounds to just bounce off the seat in front of them in a short stop collision and expect them to be perfectly fine. Our kids are not bouncy balls against a wall.

The lack of shoulder belts is a shame. It has been proven with crash test dummies that the lack of shoulder belts increases injuries by 50 per cent. It is a statistic that the NTSB has yet our Nation is doing nothing to make our kids safer. Our kids want the belts too. They are trained by their parents that the first thing we do is put our safety belts on before we move to go anywhere. The kids feel uneasy and not safe on those buses. The numbers are worse in side impacts and roll overs that buses can go through in an accident. In that type of accident the cushioned back in front of them does no help when they get thrown to the side metal frames and metal ceiling and walls.

When will   Americans be able to decide what laws they want and where their tax   money should be spent?