CBC News: At least 5 dead in Greyhound bus crash
This crash renews my interest in the reasoning behind not offering seatbelts to commercial bus passengers. While the high-back seats might offer compartementalization for head-on crashes that a bus would win most times anyway, the wide windows make a bus extremely dangerous in a rollover situation. It may be time to make seat belts for busses, and leave it to the passenger whether or not they use them. In this crash, it sounds like lives would have been saved had there been safety belts.
I took particular interest in this bus crash, because I was on the bus route back in 2002, although headed to New York from Montreal. Mind you, there’s hardly a major Greyhound route I haven’t been on in Canada, or the northern USA. I was last on a Greyhound to Toronto just two months ago, and my girlfriend was on a Greyhound returning to Saskatchewan when it broke down in the middle of the night for 6 hours with an annoying alarm sound going off until it was repaired.
Here’s a mostly random picture of me a few days after I was on that Greyhound bus route. I’m sure someone will start ranting about the UN now…
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maude | 23-Jul-07 at 10:42 pm | Permalink
Hi, I was a passenger in this bus crash. I was interviewed by the National Transport and Safety Board in the US. The reason they don’t have seatbelts, according to them, is that they don’t want to spend the money it would take to put in seatbelts, because then they would have to change the seats and redo the roofs. The roofs are designed at this time to crush in the event of rollover, to eject passegers out the windows. It’s cheaper to have crappy roofs and throw the passengers out than to redo the seats and reinforce the roofs. Safety belts would not probably save too many lives because the roof would just cave in.
Saskboy | 23-Jul-07 at 11:57 pm | Permalink
Hi Maude, Thanks for leaving a comment. It’s possible the roof caving in would negate the benefit of the seat belt, I agree.