Following the crash test, STN EXPO Indy attendees were given the opportunity to walk around the buses and view the final resting places of the belted and unbelted ATDs.
bus are behind us, in terms of COVID. I’m not positive they are, but I think everybody hopes they are. So, now we need to get back in the mode of how we get more and more school buses with seatbelts so that we can protect our kids, not just from germs but from the unlikely event of crashes.”
Crash-Test Demonstration at STN EXPO Indy Testing IMMI’s newest SafeGuard product, the Sabre
lap/shoulder belt seat, was the focus of the crash test at the CAPE facility However, another reason for the demonstration was to bring the attention back to lap/ shoulder seatbelts and school bus safety. “We need to reignite that fire,” Dobbs said of imple-
menting seatbelts in school buses. The event was the second crash test that the CAPE facility hosted for STN EXPO Indy attendees. In 2019, the CAPE team launched a school bus off a ramp and rolled it onto its side. For the crash test this year, Dobbs said that the compa-
ny intentionally didn’t collect any data on what injuries and/or fatalities the anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs) would have recorded. She added that 13 ATDs, or crash dummies, were placed throughout the bus, from smallest in the front to largest in the back, some with restraints and some without. Seven of the ATDs were secured with either SafeGuard
lap/shoulder seatbelts, integrated child seats, or the com- pany’s Super STAR. Two of the six unbelted passengers were placed out of compartmentalized position in the seating area, facing the aisle. The school bus equipped with the ATDs in the crash test was stationary at a slight 30-degree angle to the oncoming Type C bus with a wheelchair lift. The striking bus traveled at a speed of 25 mph down a straight path and crashed into the station- ary Type C at the front loading door.
46 School Transportation News • JULY 2022
This was the 22nd and 23rd school bus that CAPE has crash tested. The set up, Dobbs explained, was one that would have a predicable outcome and was easy for attendees to grasp. “We’ve done a ramped rollover. We’ve done an impact with a heavy truck or heavy truck im- pacted the bus and a T-bone. We’ve done rear impacts,” Dobbs noted. “This one is not unrealistic. You have two buses, one that’s coming into a school the other one that is waiting to turn into a school. It’s not an unrealistic crash scenario at all.”
Attendee Perspective Jessica Widmer, the transportation supervisor of
Wadsworth City Schools in Ohio, told School Transpor- tation News following the crash test that she has never attended such an event before. “I didn’t really have any expectations, so it exceeded them,” she said, adding that her school district does not have seatbelts on its buses as it’s not a state requirement. However, she noted that amount of damage on both buses was a surprise, as the moving bus only traveled 25 mph. “Honestly, everything we have talked about [at STN EXPO Indy] has encouraged me to look more into seat- belts,” Widmer said, adding that the crash-test videos played prior to the event at the IMMI facility really advo- cated for the technology. For AJ McKeand, the transportation director of Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation in Co- lumbus, Indiana, the crash test hit close to home. “We’ve had several of our own bus [crashes] so it was interesting to see it in slow motion,” he said. “My wife was in a bus accident, similar to this. Somebody blew a stop sign 14 years ago.” He said his wife was driving that school bus full of student passengers. Thankfully no one was injured.
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