Advocates want seat belts on motorcoaches

April 6, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

CLEVELAND (AP) — Federal regulators and Congress are slow to require seat belts and other safety measures on charter buses that investigators say would save lives, safety advocates argue.

Passengers die when buses overturn, said John Betts, whose 20-year-old son was among five baseball players from Ohio’s Bluffton University who died in a 2007 bus crash in Atlanta.

Since the Bluffton crash, federal authorities have investigated seven more bus accidents with at least 37 passenger deaths, all caused in rollover accidents. Most of those killed were ejected from their seats.

The lack of safety belts in motorcoaches runs counter to four decades of recommendations by the National Transportation Safety Board. Elsewhere, the European Union requires lap belts at a minimum, and Australia mandates that all new motorcoaches have lap and shoulder belts.

“It does frustrate us,” said Mark Rosenker, acting chairman of the NTSB. He said time and experience have shown that his agency’s recommendations, dating as far back as 1968, “would go a long way to certainly saving lives as it relates to motorcoach passenger ejection. It would go a long way to mitigating even injury.”

Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has the authority to impose rules, said the agency takes bus safety seriously and continues to study the issue of requiring seat belts.

“We can’t just take NTSB recommendations and rubber-stamp them,” Tyson said. “We can’t just promulgate a regulation because it sounds good. It has to be based on sound scientific research.”

The American Bus Association says motorcoach passengers are much safer than travelers in any other mode of transportation. About 631 million people travel by charter bus each year.

Any regulation needs to be based on good science, said Jackie Glassman, an attorney in Washington D.C. who works with the bus industry.

The industry also estimates that it would cost as high as $20,000 per bus for seats designed to have seat belts. Although, Greyhound, the country’s leading interstate bus carrier, is moving ahead with plans to install what experts believe are safer seats with lap and shoulder belts in 140 new buses.

Consumer groups say the sound-science argument seems like an excuse for delays.

“If you decide to fly, you’re covered by the best, strongest safety standards,” said Jacqueline Gillan, vice president of the nonprofit Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “We lead the world in safety standards. Yet if you get on a bus, it’s like you’re second-class citizens.”

Thomas Goebel, general manager of Lakefront Lines in Brook Park, which has 106 over-the-road motorcoaches, questions whether passengers would wear seat belts and who would enforce such a regulation.

“We don’t have stewardesses,” he said. And on overnight trips, passengers are likely to take off their belts and stretch out across unoccupied seats, just as many do on long plane flights.

Safety advocates say the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration needs a push, and Congress needs to get involved.

Without a deadline imposed by Congress, “NHTSA will drag its heels for years and years,” said Gerald Donaldson, senior research director for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.