What are the National Statistics regarding school bus safety?
- Unequaled safety record. There is no safer way to transport a child than in a school bus. Fatal crashes involving occupants are extremely rare events, even though school buses serve daily in every community - a remarkable 8.8 billion student trips annually. Every school day, some 440,000 yellow school buses transport more than 24 million children to and from schools and school-related activities. Said another way to give perspective to the huge magnitude of pupil transportation, the equivalent of the populations of Florida, Massachusetts and Oregon ride on a school bus twice every day - almost always without a serious incident.
- Safety Statistics. Last year, 45 states had not a single child killed as a school bus occupant - an incredible safety record. Between 1990 and 2000, an average of just six children each year died as school bus passengers. These tragedies typically involved unavoidable, severe circumstances.
- Trust the school bus for the best safety for your child. The Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that every year more than 800 school-aged children are killed as passengers in other motor vehicles, or walking or riding bicycles, during "normal school transportation hours." Most of these deaths could be prevented if children rode in school buses. Parents need to know that driving a child to school is not a safety smart decision - hands down, the school bus is the safest way to and from school. Even worse, allowing a child to drive themselves to school, or riding with other teenagers to school, increases the risk of fatality by 10 percent.
- Pedestrian fatalities. Over the past 10 years, an average of 29 children were killed in school bus-related pedestrian accidents - struck while getting on or off a school bus.
- School buses are the largest mass transit program in the U.S. School buses provide approximately 8.8 billion student trips per year. In contrast, transit buses provide only about 5.2 billion unlinked passenger trips each year in the U.S. (i.e. getting to a destination by using a single bus instead of multiple connections).