Tool idea

[Bob F]

Unless it's a poor person that can't afford medical insurance, or a person with pre-existing conditions. 45,000 deaths per year.

[Bob F]

If I have an antique socket, replace it? Or buy a gadget that eliminates obvious modern safety features? Let me think?

[kpg]

"Bob F" wrote in news:hkclmq$dkr$ [e-mail]:

Yes, except in that case...it goes without saying....

...add gw hates black people...

what a maroon...

[E Z Peaces]

Only equipment where polarization matters, has polarized plugs.

The CPSC says only 87,000 Americans a year are treated for electrical shock, so polarized plugs must be working, except of course for the

87,000 who tamper with them.

Suppose if nobody used polarized plugs there were 87,000,000 hospitalizations a year for electrical shock, at $100,000 apiece. Polarized plugs are saving us $8.7 trillion a year.

Besides, if I didn't look before I inserted a plug, I'd probably miss the outlet and damage the wall, which could easily cost another $8.7 trillion.

[clare]

How about a $14.95 brain transplant machine??? Any IDIOT who would renovate a polarized plug needs one.

[clare]

No, that's why they sell replacement polarized receptacles.

[kpg]

"Bob F" wrote in news:hkclmq$dkr$ [e-mail]:

Yes, except in that case...it goes without saying....

...add gw hates black people...

what a maroon...

[Stormin Mormon]

Only if it's sold with a polarized plug.

[HeyBub]

Then why are school busses not equipped with seat belts?

[zimpzampzormp]

You are a laughing troll aren't ye?

[salty]

Because to do so, you have to design and build a completely different bus. Seatbelts simply added to an existing bus are somewhere between useless and more dangerous.

School busses in their present form are among the safest vehicles on the road. If you want meaningful safety measures, make wearing a helmet mandatory in cars. Head injuries in car crashes are very common, and often what makes them fatal. Those that aren't killed by head inhjuries in car crashes are often left with TBI and are costly to warehouse for the rest of their lives at taxpayer expense. It would be so easy to avoid so much of it.

[HeyBub]

I suggest that airline travel is safer than school busses and airplanes are equipped with seat belts. And just because school busses are among the safest vehicles on the road that doesn't mean they can't be made safer. Nevertheless, I agree that it would cost more to retrofit seat belts in school busses than the paltry few lives it might save*.

Fact is, there's a point of diminishing returns.

------------

• One recent report says about 800 kids are killed in vehicle accidents each year. Of these, about 20 involved a school bus. Of these 20, five were passengers and 15 were pedestrians. Putting seat belts on the roughly half-million school busses in the U.S. would cost only, um, 500,000 busses x

30 seats x $75 each = $1.125 billion.

[salty]

You are neglecting the other problem. You can't simply install seatbelts in present buses. They were not designed properly for seat belts. You would have to start over with a completely new bus of a different design, and after that, still have buses that are not appreciably safer than what we have now. It's a totally misguided idea with no real payoff.

[gfretwell]

How would you get the kids to use them?

[salty]

That's another problem. They would probably enjoy whipping each other with them, more than wearing them.

[aemeijers]

Current school buses are glorified enclosed flatbed trucks. It took decades to even get the seat backs made taller and padded, to reduce the broken noses and smashed teeth that used to be common in school bus accidents. They are statistically safe mostly because they seldom travel fast, are bright frigging yellow, and have flashing lights all over them, including the ability to make passing traffic stop when needed.

A truck-based school bus, well maintained, seems to last about 10-12 years around here in salt country. (although I have seen recycled US buses in other countries that are less fussy.) Design changes could be built into the refresh cycle, and ignore the cost of doing retrofits. Given the impossibility of keeping 30-60+ kids belted in unless you add another warm adult on the bus, the best approach would likely be to make them like a carnival ride, with little padded pods for the kids to be encapsulated in. That would be an extension of the current high-back padded seat concept, plus maybe adding a little side to the seat on the aisle side, and padding the wall side. Unless the bus got upside down or the driver went crazy, that would protect in the majority of most slide-offs and intersection accidents. The ribs they added on the outside of the bus body a couple of decades ago have mostly eliminated the problem of bus being penetrated in a T-bone, much like the side guard beams do in a passenger car.

But looking at the question as a taxpayer, the biggest bang for the buck would be driver training and testing, hardass mechanical inspection of the bus itself, and hardass enforcement of the laws other drivers are supposed to follow around occupied school buses they encounter. Maybe add external cameras to the onboard cameras many buses already have, so they can get plate numbers of cars that ignore the flashing lights. with a button the driver can push when needed to snap a still.

But what do I know- I'm not an engineer. I just get trapped behind a Big Yellow Thing on the way to work 2-3 days a week.

-- aem sends...

[salty]

Well, there are a few problems. Drivers do get training, but you start off with people who are very low paid. It's essentially part time, seasonal work with no benefits. So, you aren't going to get many drivers who could get a job doing something that pays better. You will find a fair number of retired folks, and some of them may have been well educated and worked at good jobs in the past. You'll mostly get dregs, though.

Then you put these hapless folks in the drivers seat of a bus with 66 kids sitting behind them as they attempt to do everything right. Those kids are supervised at home, and supervised all day long at school. On the bus, they aren't supervised, and they tend to let loose. It really isn't the drivers fault. he's making almost no money for taking on that huge responsibility. EVERY bus really needs at least one competent adult on board besides the driver.

Buses get a lot of inspections and maintenance. The bus company has to keep records of when certain items were checked, adjusted and replaced. So, the inspectors look at those records. They mostly look at a few buses, just to confirm that what was written in the books matches what they find. If the records say the bus got new rear brake drums last month, and you find that the drums on the bus are old, scored and cracked, well then, the inspection gets racheted up, and buses start getting parked. It's not that easy to get away with lousy maintenance in my state.

People who fail to stop for a stopped school bus should lose their license for 6 months. Those are somebody's kids on that bus. Let's take it seriously.

Most cars that t-bone a bus, go under it. The passengers are pretty high up.

All in all, I really think the seatbelt argument is a loser. In my youth, I drove a school bus for a year. It was extra money that fit around my schedule at the time. Seatbelts would have caused more problems then they would have solved.

As I mentioned earlier, mandatory helmets in cars would save a lot more kids and adults (by several orders of magnitude) from TBI and death, then spending billions of dollars on school bus seatbelts.

[Lp1331 1p1331]

On cars, the purpose of seat belts is to prevent the passengers from getting tossed around in an accident, or especially ejected from the car. It would be pretty hard to get ejected from a bus in a crash, and unlikely for a car to hit a bus with enough force to toss people around. I have heard of buses getting rear-ended by cars, and the bus driver taking off, not even knowing they were hit. I remember seeing something on TV years ago about school bus safety, and most of the deadliest crashes involved gasoline powered buses catching on fire after being broadsided just right, and buses running off into water. In either case, it would seem to me that seat belts would be much more harm than good, as kids would panic and be trappped in the seats.. Just my $.02

[Jim Elbrecht]

-snip-

That is entirely dependent on your district. Our district, and the one I drove for many years ago, hires full time, pays well & includes the same benefits the teachers get-- retirement, health, drug 7 dental coverage.

Meanwhile, many districts in the same area contract out to low bidders who hire folks who couldn't get a job at McDonalds. Those are the ones you see on the news who molest their kids, leave them in the bus when it gets locked up at night, get arrested for drunk driving, etc.

Oh, yeah-- I just remembered. My daughter, fresh out of college & working for a non-profit after-school program for inner-city kids, gets to drive her kids [short bus] as part of her duties. So some of those drivers have 4 yr degrees from prestigious universities.

Jim

[salty]

Yeah. I had graduated college before I drove a bus. I sure wasn't thinkng of it as a career move.