FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, August 7, 1998
Contact: Phil Frame
Telephone: 202-366-9550
NHTSA 41-98
SLATER ANNOUNCES COMPREHENSIVE PLAN TO ENHANCE
SCHOOL BUS SAFETY
While school buses continue to be one of the safest forms
of transportation in the United States, U.S. Secretary of
Transportation Rodney E. Slater today unveiled a comprehensive
school bus program to enhance safety for passengers and
pedestrians.
"Safety is President Clinton's highest transportation
priority," said Secretary Slater. "We are committed to
providing the nation's school children the safest school
transportation possible."
The program, developed by the department's National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), addresses the safety of
children inside and outside the school bus. Efforts are focused
on pedestrians because, compared with occupant fatalities, three
times as many school bus-related deaths occur while children are
getting on or off the bus.
The agency will continue to develop and implement programs that
address pedestrian safety, grant programs that support community
efforts to reduce the number of motorists that illegally pass
school buses, and training and licensing programs to improve
driver skills.
NHTSA also has begun an extensive research program to study
occupant protection systems for school bus passengers. One
objective of the plan is to improve current school bus crash data
to better define the types of crashes that produce injuries to
occupants and evaluate the effectiveness of current Federal crash
protection requirements.
The research plan also will evaluate new school bus occupant
crash protection systems in controlled laboratory tests that
represent real-world crashes. Based on those tests, NHTSA may
propose new occupant protection requirements for school buses if
overall safety can be improved.
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