Bus Accident Lawyers

Compartmentalization and Bus Accidents

The term compartmentalization was coined in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of a study on school bus safety conducted by the UCLA, and has been a central topic of school bus and seat belt safety controversy ever since. If you have ever wondered how a mass transportation system (dealing with children, no less) like school buses can get away with having no mandatory seat belts, the answer is compartmentalization.

The basic idea of compartmentalization is often called the “egg-carton.” According to this concept, children riding on a school bus are contained and protected by individual “compartments,” in the same way that eggs are protected by the sections of an egg carton. On a bus, the walls of the compartment are actually seats. Seat backs on school buses are designed to be exceptionally tall and padded. They must meet stringent requirements for flexibility, force absorption, stability, and spacing. The goal is to ensure that, if a school bus is ever involved in a collision, students will only be thrown a short distance against the back of a seat, which will catch them and efficiently absorb the impact, thus preventing injury.

The federal government has made compartmentalization the cornerstone of its school bus safety regulations, and compartmental structural design is often cited as a viable and often more affordable safety feature than seatbelts.

In practice, compartmentalization is effective in some ways and ineffective in others. For frontal and rear-ended collisions, compartmentalization does prove able to reduce the rate of injury. However, the National Transportation Safety Board has noted that it is much less effective in collisions from the side, where seat backs cannot be relied upon to absorb impact.

Whether or not compartmentalization is effective, the school bus seat belt debate continues. Only one thing is clear – above all, the safety of our children must be preserved. If you or your child has been hurt in a bus crash, call a bus accident lawyer from Williams Kherkher at 866-950-9000 today.