School buses may be the safest vehicles on the road, but that did not prevent three New York students from recently being caught in closing bus doors and dragged alongside the bus. Now, student transportation experts are investigating to see how events like these can be avoided in the future.
Kathy Furneaux, executive director of the Pupil Transportation Safety Institute at Syracuse, New York, and Peter Lawrence, director of transportation at Fairport CSD in Rochester, recently published a paper documenting 28 incidents of students being caught in the service door of buses dating back to 2004.
They also reference an April 4, 1997 article which covered the deaths of eight students killed by being dragged alongside a bus going back to 1991. These incidents prompted the school bus industry to voluntarily recall 160,000 buses in order to modify the handrail to prevent future deaths and injuries.
The team argues that these incidents may be rare, but they are “100-percent preventable” with improved training and bus design and shouldn’t be tolerated.
“Fortunately, these types of dragging incidents have been eliminated through better design and training,” write Furneaux and Lawrence. “However, the recent upsurge in dragging incidents draws attention back to the issues surrounding school bus design and driver training.”
The paper finds that most recent dragging incidents are most likely caused by the placement of the service door switch. This switch is most often found to the left of the driver on the master panel or steering wheel, which may cause drivers to look away from students and the door when opening or closing it.
“Simply relocating this switch to a place in the sight line of the service door would allow the driver to look in the direction of the door while operating it,” they explain. “This, of course, is not the complete solution, but perhaps would contribute to efforts that prevent these service door draggings from occurring.”
Furneaux and Lawrence also believe driver distraction plays a role in these incidents. Between constantly chattering two-way radios, keeping an eye on student behavior, and managing the daily challenges of traffic, bus drivers have a lot to juggle every day.
“Nevertheless, at the moment the student is exiting the bus, nothing is more important than making sure the service door is cleared and the student has moved no less than 15 feet away from the bus before pulling back into the flow of traffic,” Furneaux and Lawrence add.
The paper included several training recommendations to improve driver awareness and help bus drivers avoid these accidents, including:
- Scan all mirrors for students outside of the bus
- Check cross-over mirrors to check for students in front of the bus, near the front wheels and in the service door area
- Next to last in the sequence – Glance back at the service door to look for students before actually moving the bus
- Perform mirror sweep once again before pulling out into traffic
