ANALYSIS State-to-State Variance in By Ned Einstein
Crossing Procedures First in an exclusive seven-part series Having served as an expert witness on nearly 60 crossing accidents, roughly half of them involving
school buses, I found certain themes common to many of them. However, the range and diversity of mistakes made were nothing short of astonishing, and they illustrate a disturbingly widespread pat- tern of ignorance and misinformation among members of our transportation community who should, frankly, know better. I am convinced that much of this reflects our community’s refusal to examine this touchy subject
responsibly — particularly the National Congress on School Transportation, which has never once ad- dressed any of the system design or operating issues involved in crossing, apart from dealing with crossing equipment, during its 70-year history. Otherwise, in fairness to the NCST and the community at large, few if any individuals have had the chance to view these problems from the same perspective that I have — being asked to examine each incident in excruciating detail, and exploring its intertwined cousins, safety and liability, in a courtroom, and in the process leading up to it (issues often “settled” before they end up there, which as a by-product, impedes the sharing of this information as a condition of the settle- ment’s “confidentiality”). Recently, I came upon an eye-opening study titled “School Bus Stop Laws in the United States,
Canada and Other Countries,” that focused on the extraordinary differences in crossing-related policies, procedures and practices among various states and provinces. Tis document, published in 2005-2006, was authored by J. Jim, a member of the National Motorists Association, an organization founded in 1982 to protect the rights of motorists. Much of the information presented in the series of installments that follow this introduction is taken directly from that study, which was organized in a state-by-state format. In contrast, the future installments are structured by type of procedure, which better illustrates
the degree of variation from state to state. Because the examples are necessarily limited, I highly recommend that every member of our community concerned with the central purpose of our ex- istence also read the original study. And because that study is now five years old, and my own experiences date back as far as 20 years, a few things have likely changed. So I hope I will be forgiven for presenting any examples that are obsolete and/or incorrect, and welcome any information that will update and correct it.
Variation, Catastrophes and Political Knee-Jerking While the evolution of school buses stemmed from a single origin — the use of horse-driven buck-
boards to transport rural students often long distances to schools in the early 20th century — events that occurred from time to time in various states began to shape the variations in both vehicles and operations. One intriguing example is the difference in window-opening sizes from state-to-state. Connecti-
cut’s regulations, which require the nation’s smallest openings (7 inches), stemmed from an incident where a student stuck his head out the window in a tightly-packed schoolyard, and it was summarily chopped off by a fellow school bus passing too closely to the victim’s bus. Te State of Washington, joined by many others following the famous Carrollton and Alton accidents of the 1980s, requires 12-inch window openings, largely for evacuation purposes. Te short-lived TAM 252 school bus was designed with 14-inch window openings: two members of that project’s “User Design Committee” had been defensive tackles for Washington State University, and insisted that a large high school student be able to exit the passenger windows while wearing shoulder pads. Because no Washington school child has been beheaded (to my knowledge), and no Connecti-
cut school bus has been enveloped by flames or submerged into a deep canal, these distinctions have been relatively harmless, as are many state-specific variations. But many of the other
48 School Transportation News Magazine June 2011
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