INC NEWS - Federal Rules on School Bus Seatbelts and Seat backs

[Pat Carstensen]

If you need something new to be outraged about, the Highway Transportation Safety folks are proposing an unfunded mandate to have higher seat backs and seat belts on school buses.  Well, they are saying it isn't an unfunded mandate since we can take money from the fund that goes to fixing unsafe intersections.  In either case, my suspicion is that the school bus manufacturers are salivating about all the sales they are going to make.

We all want to keep kids on school buses safer, but anyone who has been on a school bus knows that higher seat backs may make the students safer in a crash, but less safe on the ride.  We don't need to make it harder for bus drivers to spot and stop fights, harassment, careless tossing of objects, sex and general fooling around at the back of the bus.  Plus where most kids are hurt is when they are out of their seats, getting on or off the bus.

Also, we have much better ways to spend the highway safety grants than.  I am quite frankly tired of having people killed before the anyone does anything about unsafe intersections.

And if we wanted to mandate something, energy efficiency and less toxic emissions would be a lot more useful.

If you want to see the press release on the Secretary of Transportation's touting of this supposed great reform:  
www.nhtsa.gov/portal/site/nhtsa/template.MAXIMIZE/menuitem.f2217bee37fb302f6d7c121046108a0c/?javax.portlet.tpst=1e51531b2220b0f8ea14201046108a0c_ws_MX&javax.portlet.prp_1e51531b2220b0f8ea14201046108a0c_viewID=detail_view&itemID=7dfd61d045856110VgnVCM1000002fd17898RCRD&pressReleaseYearSelect=2007
The proposal is at
www.nhtsa.dot.gov/

If you are moved to comment, they haven't made it easy.  Go to www.regulations.gov.  
Now you have to get to the specific proposal, and what worked for me was to go to Step 4, Click on the arrow next to "No Category Selected" and you can pick "Document Title" from the menu.  Type school bus in the blank, click on "exact phrase" and press Submit

Hopefully NHTSA-2007-0014 will pop up among the returned search results, click on it.

At the end of the blue bar on the page that pops up, it says "add comments" -- click on the yellow bubble under it to get to a form you can write on.

You'd think they don't really want to hear from citizens (-:

Regards, pat

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