Safe Speed Forums

Fiona Bruce and her "Real Story" focussed on the School Buses tonight.

Actually - far from being green.. these buses belch out more greenhouse gases than any car. Old.. defective .. and they are also picking up normal commuters when not on a school run

However, the investigation revealed that well over a third of all buses and minibuses were ordered off the road as truly dangerous on spot checks and almost all the rest had some defect or other.

Interestingly, Wales granted a three year licence to an operator who had previously been banned from operating a school bus and mini bus service after a young girl died as a result of an accident. Driver took a bend too fast and ended up hitting another car and sliding on its roof along the road.

CREB checks are not carried out.. (though all this really proves that the person has not been caught doing anything untoward. There have been plenty of teachers "found to have escaped the net". You only need to read the local papers ..

It seems Education Departments and not the Transport departments negotiate deals with bus services and choose the cheapest one.

For people who profess to be "road safety conscious" and quick to wag fingers if a driver blips over a speed limit or does not park properly .. but just stops to let kids out of the car.. the policy of not vetting bus companies and drivers properly "because they offer cheapest rate for three years" is a bit counterproductive and a non starter in the greener than thee and safety argument

I pay £450 per child per year for the school bus. I use the service which is owned by the school my own children attend. I also use the service which the council provide for the foster children (apart from the one we phsyically lead into school)

I'd say there's a difference .. as my own are in the same coach and with the same driver all the time. The county version ... age of the bus ranges from nice and new to ageing. They do not always have the same driver and the cost is the same as the independent school one.

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It's not only school buses that are unroadworthy. The bus company local to me had half their fleet condemened. Unfortunately the inspector was too weak to order them off the road instantly as it would have affected the timetabling too much. The other bus companies around here are even worse. They run ancient fume belching heaps. Local taxis have to be less than a certain age now and I think it is time to say buses above a certain age should not be used unless they are inspected every 3 months at the bus company's expense and scrapped if they fail more than so many inspections.

Those plaxton thingummies seem to go on forever as I am sure I saw one of my old school buses and it was ancient (A reg or so) when I was at school still running around. This is probably why bus companies have private reg plates so people can't tell their bus is 40 years old...

Yes, that's exactly why they have private plates on them!

I did a televised test on an old coach that had been retro-fitted with seat belts for one of those hard-hitting consumer type TV programmes some years ago. Nobody really expected the thing to meet any kind of test standard but even we were amazed by how crap the installation was. On the first row of seats, I actually ripped one of the fittings through the coach floor whilst taking up the slack in the chains! On the subsequent ones we had to "cheat" a bit with the test rig to get the load low enough so that the seat didn't rip out before the camera man had enough footage!

On the other hand, we do have to ask ourselves, how many kids got hurt last year whilst travelling in dodgy school buses and then ask ourselves how many got hurt in cars....

Whilst I share your desire to see improvements in the state of bus fleets outside of London, I think you're forgetting one quite important point. Most bus routes are operated on a commercial basis with no funding from the local authority, so the operating company would have little or no incentive to continue running any services if the background costs of doing so outweighed the income from those services. My local operator has a mixture of new and old buses - all of the new ones were bought to operate on routes where the company gets a subsidy... meanwhile the "new" buses for their non-subsidised routes are cast-offs from their London operations, and despite being the most recent additions to the fleet they are also some of the oldest buses in the fleet.

So, if you want bus companies to pay for new(er) buses and extra inspections on older buses out of their own pockets, you'll either have to start subsidising all routes, allow bus fares to rise (and then rise again to cover any loss in revenue from people who stop using the buses due to the increased costs), allow route frequencies to drop (which on some routes may be indistinguishable from no service whatsoever), or figure out a way to make new buses as cheap to buy as current second/third/nth-hand rattlers.

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Chris