Editorial: Give bus riders seat belts

Tuesday, March 27, 2007 | 7:31 a.m.

The issue over seat-belt use in cars and trucks, discussed in the editorial above, concerns enforcement. With buses, however, enforcement is not an issue because there is nothing to enforce. Most buses do not even have seat belts.

It took another tragedy for this fact to once again come into public focus. Seven people were ejected and killed March 2 when a bus carrying an Ohio college baseball team plunged off an overpass in Atlanta.

The Toledo Blade reported that the father of one of the victims said investigators told him that seat belts could have saved the victims' lives.

The Blade also reported on a 1999 study released by the National Transportation Safety Board. The board recommended that federal regulators set new standards to reduce the number of passengers ejected during bus accidents. But as the Blade reported, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is still reviewing that eight-year-old study.

Statistically, as the newspaper reported, buses are one of the safest modes of transportation. But why not make them even safer? The paper interviewed a former head of the transportation safety board, Jim Hall, who noted the international use of seat belts on buses. "The only place you see a failure to act is here in the United States," Hall said.

We believe all new buses - city buses, school buses, long-distance buses - should come standard with seat belts. We also believe that all operators of buses should retrofit their existing vehicles with this safety feature that has been proven to save lives.