I _always_ buckle up, even in bus.
I've gotten looks from taxi drives in south Europe for this, they treat it as an insult. I feel it's better to insult than be dead.
Afaik since you get fined quite severely in Norway where I live (and most of Europe) if you don't wear a seat belt, the rate of use is much higher than the US.
He will be missed. Hopefully it can put focus on such a simple thing to save lives.
Here's a fun fact: the yellow school busses most North Americans get trucked to school in usually don't have seatbelts. The reason is that they follow a different school of thought regarding safety.
The basic idea is that instead of giving everyone seatbelts that unruly kids won't adjust properly and will use to whack each other's teeth out, you make really high padded seats so that in the case of an accident the passengers go flying into the seat in front of them, but its a relatively short distance and a soft, sturdy landing. The theory is called 'compartmentalization' if you're looking for a google search term. Here's one:
We have a local school bus that took a head-on collision at speed (bus traveling 45mph, oncoming pickup at 60mph) and treated the occupants very well. The bus was full of high schoolers, the pickup was driven by another high schooler. The bus driver took a break near the ankle and none of the students sustained anything more than bumps and bruises.
Now, a lot comes into play here - the bus outweighs the pickup by several times, so it has the momentum to absorb the oncoming momentum and keep moving. But it's certainly not like hitting a flying bug. All that energy from the truck headed the opposite direction has to go somewhere, and it slows the bus dramatically in an instant. And these are high schoolers - no matter how many times the driver reminds them to sit down, sit correctly, they just won't. And even after all that, with no one besides the driver in a seatbelt, the students were all OK. (To satisfy curiosity: the driver of the pickup took serious injuries of which none were life-threatening; he spent two days in the hospital. He'd gotten impatient driving behind a tractor/trailer and decided to pass immediately after a curve without checking the lane first. This was a two-lane state "highway" and he was indeed in a zone that allowed passing.)
Then there's the Really Bad Accidents where the bus ends up on its side or upside down. Seatbelts are designed the hold under stress-- the button becomes near-impossible to operate and release. Smaller children will require the assistance of an adult. And there's ONE on the bus. With 50 kids. They make a safe belt cutter that a driver can carry, but now the driver has to visit every seat with multiple belts, cutting kids free, supporting them so they don't fall. This is not a scenario I'd care to have enter reality.
I can't speak to every seat belt buckle - but I went off a 20' foot cliff in a 70's sedan of some kind. (Grandmother was driving, she fell asleep). The seat belt left a perfect imprint of a bruise, down to the stitching on my chest and waste, but I (and my grandmother) had absolutely zero difficulty popping the seatbelt. The fall when we popped them wasn't that far, as 3/4 of the car had crushed.
Both of us walked away without a single injury other than the bruises from the seat belt. I've worn them religiously ever since that day.
> The seat belt left a perfect imprint of a bruise, down to the stitching on my chest and waste
One of the serious accidents I was in (my grandmother turned a corner very slowly and the other driver was going 130km/h, with a pregnant lady in the passengers seat) did the exact same thing to me. I also got a black eye; apparently right as the accident happened I entered the brace position so quickly I hit my eye socket on my own knee!
Are you sure the button becomes difficult to use? I might be very wrong here, but I'd at least hope that "release easily even when hanging upside down" might be a design requirement of the average safety belt buckle. Perhaps this is why aircraft belts have very different buckles than car belts? Can anyone provide more detail?
I'm not sure the claim is true. I only have one personal experience to base this on (fortunately) but I was in an accident as a passenger in a Jeep Wrangler which ended up upside-down on its roll-cage. Both the driver and I were hanging from our belts and had no problem undoing the buckles. We had to do it one-handed with our other hand trying to support ourselves so as not to drop on our heads after releasing the buckle. Click, release, just like normal.
I was in a severe single car accident in a 80s era truck, where I ended up rolling many times down into a ditch, and finally resting upside down. Seat belt did not release, the button was just solid, and I had to hold my body up to un-catch the strap ratchet so that it would relax, and I could wiggle out. In the whole event, the hardest part was kicking out the driver side window to get out of the cab.
The only part that saved my life was that I had stacked a bunch of HP servers right behind the driver seat, the rest of the cabin was completely crushed in ;-)
(Edit: I will never own a 4x4 or any high center of gravity vehicle which doesn't have a roll cage ever again. The day after the accident, I was sitting at the junk yard looking at the mashed ball of metal which used to be my truck, I couldn't believe I walked away without a scratch.)
The trouble with the theory is that the seats on the buses I rode on were neither particularly high nor particularly soft. On the bus I rode regularly, the back of the seat in front did not have exposed metal, but many in my town did. Frankly, the fabric covered ones were not much better as you could feel the metal bar beneath the fabric. Even as a kid, I knew I was likely to get seriously injured in the event of an accident. Thankfully, accidents are rare. Perhaps, newer buses are somewhat better, but I imagine most of the old ones are still in service.
My bus driver would stop and lecture us about this. His reasoning was that in case of an accident, evacuation is difficult if all the kids are buckled in. So if there was a fire (not sure how likely that is), we'd be worse off with seat belts. Now that I'm older, I'm pretty sure he wasn't speaking from a point of deep experience or research, but he was very passionate about the subject, enough to drop us off late several times due to such lectures.
As trivial as you may consider their argument, if the potential benefit of installing and enforcing the use of seat belts on school buses is small enough, it may not take much justification to do nothing.
In the US from 2003-2012, there were an annual average of 6 fatalities of non-driver occupants of school buses[1].
"They treat it as an insult" — also some US drivers. I just say "Oh, I trust _your_ driving, it's the drunks and crazies out there that I don't trust."
I've heard of people treating that as an insult, but I've had the opposite experience: I've had taxy drivers asking me to use the seatbelt when I forgot to.
Since you've mentioned south Europe, here in Serbia since a few years ago the fines for not using a seatbelt are so high that taxi drivers often ask you to buckle up if you don't do it yourself and they never give you strange look for using it. At least one good thing here.
Oddly, you get fined in the U.S. for not wearing a seatbelt in the car you're driving ("Click it or ticket!") but I've never heard of someone being cited for not wearing one in a cab. Is it because it's the back seat?
At least in manhattan, the yellow-taxi cab Taxi and Limousine Commission (the TLC I mentioned above) lobbied have an exemption to that law. Same thing with baby carriers. It's illegal to have a baby in a car without a certified car seat, but it's legal in a NYC taxi to just hold them:
Surely its the other way around. It's reasonable to expect all adults to wear a seatbelt in a taxi but not reasonable to expect all taxis to carry child seats. It wouldn't be unusual to expect on occasion for a parent to travel with 3-3 children; should all taxis therefore carry 3 child seats? No. Should all adults travelling in taxis use a seatbelt when one is available and required when travelling in private transport? Surely yes.
I wonder how much extra you could charge for having a vehicle in the uber fleet with a variety of child seats, or similarly various handicapped accessories.
Why? It would be a major hassle otherwise when visiting cities like SF or NYC if you are not planning to rent a car (if you are, you might be carrying a car seat). I wouldn't be comfortable using a random carseat in the trunk, and in any case, given different age kids require different carseats, it's not really feasible.
Would you be more comfortable using none than using a "random one in the trunk"? I do not really see how a carseat can cause additional harm in an accident.
This is just so fundamentally disconnected from anything I can relate with I don't know what to say. I'm all about being critical of "safety first", sometimes to the chagrin of my wife, but having or even requiring child seats is not bubble wrapping. (though I do find the "until they're 9" in California a bit much)
He will be missed. Hopefully it can put focus on such a simple thing to save lives.