Federal Regulators Nearing Bus Seat Belt Mandate

Speaking in an interview at the 2013 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, National Highway Traffic Safety Traffic Administrator David Strickland announced his hopes to finalize a number of new safety regulations by the end of the year, including one that would require seat belts on all commercial buses. Though noting “interagency issues” that still remain in the way, Strickland said that he believed the seat belt rule would be issued “very soon”. Other pending regulations will look to further improve bus passenger safety in the event of a crash, requiring improvements to bus rollover structural integrity, emergency evaluation procedures, and fire protection.

Once finalized and formally introduced, the new seat belt regulation will take three years to go into effect, costing $25 million annually, or about $13,000 per bus, with the potential of saving as many as 8 lives each year according to NHTSA estimates. Though the proposed rules would not require all 29,000 commercial buses in operation today to be retrofitted with seat belts, citing potential cost issues for smaller bus liners, the federal safety agency has not ruled out the possibility of implementing the idea at a later date. In its current form, the new regulation would simply require seat belts to be installed on all new buses built. The NTHSA cannot require passengers to use these seat belts however, though the hope is that states will implement such rules as they have already done with automobiles.

Seat belt laws have been a topic of debate amongst federal regulators in some capacity since 1977, as accidents like the Bluffton University baseball team bus crash that killed seven in 2007 continue to highlight the fatal dangers facing unrestrained passengers. Last year, Congress called for a federal belt requirement as a part of a larger Transportation reauthorization bill aimed at improving road safety for public transportation.

Even today, motor coach travel remains a major mode of transportation, as more than 750 million passengers are driven more than 1.8 billion miles each year. On average, 19 of these bus passengers are killed in accidents annually. Between 1999 and 2008, a total of 54 fatal crashes were reported, killing 186. With these newly mandated seat belts in place, the NHTSA believes that the fatality rate in rollover accidents could be reduced by a total of 77%, also eliminating the need for countless lengthy legal battles and the interference of bus accident lawyers.

Also discussed by Strickland was a pending regulation surrounding new vehicle to vehicle communication technology, which is currently being tested on 3,000 vehicles in Ann Arbor, Michigan. These systems, which would be installed on passenger vehicles and potentially commercial buses, send important information about a vehicle’s location and speed to others on the road, helping to illuminate the threat of accidents in crowded intersections or blind turns. With such a network of information in place, the NHTSA believes that has many as 80% of all light-vehicle accidents could be avoided, along with the congestion that surrounds it, saving the country as much as $88 billion dollars each year.