New York bus crash: Why don't coach buses have seat belts?

A Saturday-morning bus crash on a New York highway has left 15 dead. Initial reports suggested that the discount bus, ferrying passengers from the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut to New York's Chinatown, had seat belts, but an employee for World Wide Tours told Slate that it did not. (See bus interior images here.) It's actually common, and perfectly legal, for buses to forgo belts. Why? Because it's not clear that they're effective. A study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2002 determined that, on large school buses, "lap belts appear to have little, if any, benefit in reducing serious-to-fatal injuries in severe frontal crashes. On the contrary, lap belts could increase the incidence of serious neck injuries and possibly abdominal injury among young passengers in severe frontal crashes." The same study found that lap-shoulder belts?the kind you wear in a car?do reduce head and neck injuries, but only a little. In most accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board has found that "compartmentalization," the protection of passengers with closely spaced bus seats with foam cushioning, works just as well. That said, seat belts could reduce the risk of death in a bus rollover crash by 77 percent, according to the NHTSA.

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