USATP Blog //

Monday, May 4, 2009

It’s time to buckle up!

Motorcoach passengers traveling in America are dying in alarming and record numbers and it’s time to ratchet-up not just the talk, but US Government action, to improve our safety on the motorcoaches we call home during our tours. There’s simply no other way to combat the recent spate of deaths occurring in the industry without government mandates and deadlines. And while this might seem like a recent phenomenon, the chatter for improved motorcoach safety has actually been going on for decades with little movement from the suits in Washington, DC. Shocking, I know.

On April 30, 2009, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood ordered a full departmental review of motorcoach safety. The order comes none to soon as recent statistics of passenger deaths is skyrocketing. The most recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report available, dated August 2007, reported over a ten year period (1996-2005), there were 48 fatal motorcoach crashes. During that period, on average, 14 fatalities occurred annually to occupants of motorcoaches in crash and rollover events, with two of the fatalities being drivers. Approximately 29% of the fatal crashes resulted in rollover. Ejection of passengers from motorcoaches accounted for approximately 56% of passenger fatalities.  And in that 10-year period, 65% of the crashes were single vehicle events and involved running off the road, hitting roadside objects, or rolling over.

At the time of the report in 2007, the NHTSA, generally favorable to the safety record of the motorcoach industry, suggested three main recommendations to improve passenger safety:

1) Improve motorcoach roof strength
2) Add seat belts to all motorcoaches
3) Improve fire protection for passengers

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which investigates crashes in the United State, can only pass along its recommendations to others in the U.S. Department of Transportation. It lacks the authority to impose rules. The NTSB designated the improvement of roof strength in motorcoaches as one of its “Most Wanted” safety recommendations. Specifically, the NTSB recommends developing performance standards for motorcoach roof strength that provide maximum survival space for all seating positions. Concerning the Installation of seat belts, the NTSB believes it would be the most direct method of retaining passengers within the seating compartment. As for fire, motorcoach occupants are afforded fire protection safety primarily through the requirements and test procedures specified in a government standard established in 1972 (with minor modifications in 1975), which applied to passenger cars, multipurpose passenger vehicles, trucks, and buses.

Safety precautions have come under great debate with the country’s recent run of fatal bus crashes. It’s been more than two years since a charter bus plunged off a freeway overpass in Georgia (March 2, 2007), killing the driver, his wife and five members of the baseball team from Ohio’s Bluffton University. However, federal regulators and Congress have yet to require seat belts and other safety measures that investigators say would save lives. And since the Bluffton crash, federal authorities have investigated nine more bus accidents with at least 67 passenger deaths, all caused in rollover accidents. Most of those killed were ejected from their seats.

Australia mandates that all new motorcoaches have lap and shoulder belts, and the lack of safety belts in American motorcoaches also departs from the practices of the European Union, which requires lap belts (but not shoulder restraints) at a minimum. It also runs counter to four decades of recommendations by the NTSB. The agency with the power to enact changes in safety regulations, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as well as Congress, has taken an exceedingly slow approach that safety advocates and investigators find maddening.

National, interstate bus carrier Greyhound, with little publicity, launched a potentially groundbreaking new practice when the company installed what experts believe to be safer seats in 140 new buses. The improved seat design, with lap and shoulder belts, will reportedly minimize injuries if a passenger should strike the seat in front of him. “In every platform where lap and shoulder belts have been introduced, injuries and fatalities have been reduced by 45 percent,” said James Johnson, director of corporate sales at IMMI, an Indiana company that conducted and analyzed seat testing and is supplying Greyhound’s new seats. “We expect to see the same thing with motorcoaches.”

Since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report in 2007, there have been well-publicized and deadly crashes across the country, including one in Mexican Hat, Utah, in January 2008. A bus carrying passengers from a ski trip plunged down an embankment, killing nine passengers and injuring 42—and ejecting 50 from their seats. The NTSB report stated the bus rounded a bend on a rural two-lane Utah highway at an estimated 88-92 mph, crashed through a guardrail and rolled down an embankment.

August 20, 2008, in rural Texas, a motorcoach carrying Vietnamese church members went over a guardrail and plummeted into a dry creek bed, killing 17 people and injuring 38. On January 30, 2009, a tour bus crashed in northwestern Arizona, killing seven tourists and injuring 10 after it veered across a highway and flipped on its side. On April 28, 2009 a California charter motorcoach carrying French tourists overturned on a Highway 101 overpass at Camphora Gloria Road near Soledad, CA, which is about 70 miles southeast of San Jose. At least five people died and dozens more were injured. Four passengers were ejected and one person killed after being hurled off the overpass. Two victims were pronounced dead on the roadway, two others were pronounced dead after being transported to hospitals. The driver was one of the dead. And just the other day, on May 2nd, a tour bus crashed into a freeway divider in Southern California injuring all 28 people aboard including eight who suffered critical injuries.

Of course, the charter-bus industry says that bus travel is extremely safe, especially when the number of people traveling by bus—631 million passengers a year—is factored in. The American Bus Association uses a figure to show that motorcoach passengers are much safer than travelers in any other mode of transportation, although critics say that claim is grossly inflated. But many in the bus industry say there may be other ways to improve safety, and they point to cost estimates as high as $20,000 per bus for seats designed to have seat belts—a prohibitive sum, some say, for small charter companies.

With our coaches full and nary a passenger strapped in a seat belt, we’re all in a potentially fatal situation on a daily basis when traveling the major Interstate Highways of the country. It’s time the Government mandate the addition of seat belts (and shoulder restraints if possible) to the coaches no matter what the cost. If a motorcoach operator cannot withstand the financial burden, they need to close up shop.

Our lives are worth the investment.

Special thanks to the following websites for my use of statistics and quotes from their stories while writing this blog entry: abclocal.go.com; sacbee.com; roamingtimes.com; busride.com; etrucker.com and saferoads.org