A tragic school van accident in China in 2011 has spurred the country to make changes to increase school transportation safety.
The accident involved a van rated for nine passengers. In this case, the vehicle was loaded with 62 kindergarten students, the driver and a teacher. The van hit a dump truck head-on; 19 students, the driver and the teacher were killed. The person responsible for the safety of the school vehicle received seven years in the Chinese penitentiary.
At the end of the 2013-14 school year, Dr. James Wang from the Chongqing Jiaotong University invited us to present school bus safety information programs to university students and government representatives in Chongqing, the “Mountain City” of China.
The meeting was part of their Production Safety Activities Month, which focused on ways to improve safety for their yellow school buses.
Extreme growth
China is in the unique position of experiencing a transportation boom that is difficult to visualize. In the U.S., we have approximately 480,000 school buses, and China needs to build 1.2 million total school buses. By 2015, they plan to build 50,000 school buses and create improved rules and regulations (focusing on school bus operations, driver training, vehicle maintenance, etc.) for their 34 provinces.
Looking back on U.S. history, our school bus founding fathers must have struggled in 1938 when organizing the 1939 national standards conference. Trying to organize a transportation system in its infancy must have been a formidable challenge within the U.S. with a population of approximately 130.9 million people at the time.
Now imagine about 1.1 billion more people in China (approximate population of 1.2 billion) assembling representatives across their 34 provinces to discuss school bus standards, trying to come to a consensus. Some may have never seen a yellow school bus in person before.
Moving forward
During our trip to China, we spoke at a conference on school bus safety and presented school bus information to local law enforcement officials, Chinese education officials and students who were studying civil engineering at Chongqing Jiaotong University.
We discussed school bus transportation in the U.S., school bus regulations, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, school bus procedures, and school bus driver and student safety training, highlighting how it can reduce injuries and fatalities.
Dr. James Wang, his professors and his students were gracious hosts and engaged in discussions about the differences between our transportation systems and Chinese school buses. As an example, in China every school bus is required to have a teacher ride the bus to ensure that discipline is maintained. It is hard to imagine this happening in the U.S. for every one of our approximately 480,000 school buses.
This is a best practice that China uses and that operations in the U.S. should consider. While certain school districts, like Buffalo Public Schools in New York state, have a similar situation with a monitor/attendant on every regular-education bus, this is not common in most places within our country. Driving a school bus is a demanding job, and having another adult on the bus (teacher or monitor/attendant) appears to be much safer, as the driver can focus on the most dangerous mile, the one ahead, instead of balancing attention between highway challenges and passenger distractions.













