School Bus Crash Outside Batavia

This is one of my pet issues on my show, and I'll usually tell everyone about school bus accidents. My purpose, to get seat belts on every school bus. Compartmentalization (which turns your child into a projectile) has proven itself to be far inferior to seat belts. The cost of seat belts on buses is low, could easily be phased in, and have proven to improve safety, and behavior of children in the districts they are used. There is no reasonable argument against them.

One of the arguments I did receive was how big, and safe a bus is. Given the recent collisions involving buses and similar sized vehicles ... that argument is trash. SUV's easily overturn school buses as well, and we've seen that a couple dozen times this year.

Yet another argument was that the drivers were so well trained that the likelihood of an accident was minute. I have a relative who drives a school bus, and family friends who drive school buses ... all say the same thing: "We may be trained, but other drivers aren't." If someone else makes a mistake and slams into the bus ... there is little the bus driver can do.

After becoming annoyed that the media was not reporting school bus accidents ... I began to. The first year I was on the radio I averaged one school bus accident a week in the US, but you would have never known about it with the lack of media coverage. Many involved deaths, and serious injuries that were all preventable had the children had seat belts.

Today, a small bus crashed with a dump truck. While many small buses do have seat belts for special needs kids it proves that accidents happen no matter how well trained a driver is.

I don't know if this bus has belts, but several people went to the hospital ... some by helicopter.

You can go to the NCSPS website for more info on bus accidents.