CBS News
In a first, one company is making three-point seatbelts standard on all school buses
On any given school day, more than 25 million kids ride a school bus, one of the safest vehicles on the road — with one exception: the vast majority of those buses have no seatbelts.
Videos of accidents involving school buses show kids bouncing around like sneakers in a dryer, and it’s not just the students who are in danger.
Doug Williamson’s sister, 5th grade teacher Jennifer Williamson-Kennedy, was killed along with a student on a school bus in 2018 when a dump truck crushed the bus while riding on a New Jersey highway.
Williamson-Kennedy was a beloved teacher who taught in the district her entire career. There’s now a scholarship in her name and people still leave things on her brother’s porch in her memory years later.
The bus actually had lap belts, but not the much safer three-point safety belts.
“If they all had safety belts that day, it would have been a different outcome,” Williamson said.
The crash led the state to pass more robust seatbelt safety laws.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board have long said seatbelts are safest, and a crash test at IMMI’s Indiana facility observed by CBS News shows it. A box truck moving at 40 mph hurtled into a stationary school bus. The crash dummies inside wearing three-point seat belts barely moved, while the unbelted dummies were sent flying.
Over one 10-year period, 1,110 people were killed in school bus crashes, an average of 111 people a year. As a result, eight states have laws on the books requiring new school buses to have seat belts.
Mark Rosekind, the former administrator of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, recommended seat belts on school buses back in 2015, but many in the industry fought back, often citing the cost — more than $8,500 per bus.
“They use that as an excuse not to take action in an area they know could save lives,” Rosekind said.
Drivers are also at risk, as until recently, none of the iconic yellow school buses came equipped with airbags for the driver.
Starting this fall, bus manufacturer Blue Bird’s new buses will offer three-point seatbelts for every passenger. Next year, they will include driver airbags at no extra cost, thanks to IMMI.
“This is an industry first,” Blue Bird President Britton Smith said. “First time that there’s been three-point lap shoulder belts as standard equipment.”
Safety advocacy groups and agencies have been calling for these features for years. Rosekind is hoping Blue Bird’s changes spread throughout the industry and the country.
“This should be a gauntlet. This should be the standard,” he said.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill Saturday that would have required new cars to beep at drivers if they exceed the speed limit in an effort to reduce traffic deaths.
California would have become the first to require such systems for all new cars, trucks and buses sold in the state starting in 2030. The bill would have mandated that vehicles beep at drivers when they exceed the speed limit by at least 10 mph.
The European Union has passed similar legislation to encourage drivers to slow down. California’s proposal would have provided exceptions for emergency vehicles, motorcycles and motorized scooters.
In explaining his veto, Newsom said federal law already dictates vehicle safety standards and adding California-specific requirements would create a patchwork of regulations.
The National Highway Traffic Safety “is also actively evaluating intelligent speed assistance systems, and imposing state-level mandates at this time risks disrupting these ongoing federal assessments,” the Democratic governor said.
Opponents, including automotive groups and the state Chamber of Commerce, said such regulations should be decided by the federal government, which earlier this year established new requirements for automatic emergency braking to curb traffic deaths. Republican lawmakers also said the proposal could make cars more expensive and distract drivers.
The legislation would have likely impacted all new car sales in the U.S., since the California market is so large that car manufacturers would likely just make all of their vehicles comply.
California often throws that weight around to influence national and even international policy. The state has set its own emission standards for cars for decades, rules that more than a dozen other states have also adopted. And when California announced it would eventually ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, major automakers soon followed with their own announcement to phase out fossil-fuel vehicles.
Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, who sponsored the bill, called the veto disappointing and a setback for street safety.
“California should have led on this crisis as Wisconsin did in passing the first seatbelt mandate in 1961,” Wiener said in a statement. “Instead, this veto resigns Californians to a completely unnecessary risk of fatality.”
The speeding alert technology, known as intelligent speed assistance, uses GPS to compare a vehicle’s pace with a dataset of posted limits. If the car is at least 10 mph over, the system emits a single, brief, visual and audio alert.
The proposal would have required the state to maintain a list of posted speed limits, and it’s likely that those would not include local roads or recent changes in speed limits, resulting in conflicts.
The technology has been used in the U.S. and Europe for years. Starting in July, the European Union will require all new cars to have the technology, although drivers would be able to turn it off. At least 18 manufacturers including Ford, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Nissan, have already offered some form of speed limiters on some models sold in America, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 10% of all car crashes reported to police in 2021 were related to speeding. This was especially a problem in California, where 35% of traffic fatalities were speeding-related — the second highest in the country, according to a legislative analysis of the proposal.
Last year the NTSB recommended federal regulators require all new cars to alert drivers when they speed. Their recommendation came after a crash in January 2022, when a man with a history of speeding violations ran a red light at more than 100 mph and struck a minivan, killing himself and eight other people.
