A Safer Ride
In the summer of 1995, NRDC launched its Dump Dirty Diesels Campaign, which eventually helped reduce diesel emissions from New York City Transit's bus fleet by 97 percent. When cities across the country followed suit, the federal government took notice and adopted strict tailpipe pollution standards for new trucks, buses, farm tractors, construction equipment, and almost any other vehicle with a diesel engine. Still, the job was not complete.
In 2001 a team of NRDC scientists in California showed that pollution inside school buses continued to be a problem. According to their study, students were exposed to four to six times more noxious diesel soot than passengers in cars traveling alongside the buses. Most school buses have open crankcases directly below the cabin, which allows pollution to travel into the space where children sit.
Armed with these data, the director of NRDC's Clean Fuels and Vehicles Project, senior attorney Rich Kassel, doggedly pursued his goal: to help craft a new law -- signed by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg in October 2009 -- which requires the city to filter the crankcase exhaust of school buses. Retrofitting this one part will reduce most of the pollution inside the buses, according to Kassel, who expects other U.S. cities will adopt similar measures.
"Even in the toughest of fiscal climates, cities can take these relatively inexpensive steps to virtually eliminate a serious pollution risk for kids traveling to school," Kassel says.
I appreciate any improvement to making our school buses safer and cleaning up diesel emissions is certainly a noble effort. However does anyone else have a problem with the lovely picture of the smiling girl waving from the bus? I do and here is why. She is not restrained by a safety belt and neither are her classmates. In fact the only one wearing a safety belt on the bus is the driver. The arguments that they are not considered “necessary” and the children won’t wear them have been proven wrong time and time again. Of course it is the law for children and adults to be restrained in their own vehicles but somehow that just doesn’t work for school buses. What kind of mixed message are we giving the children here? The cost has been estimated to retro-fit buses with seatbelts would be about $1.50 per child per year or less than a penny a day. Allowing our children “A Safer Ride” indeed should be a national priority let’s not forgot to “buckle up” as well.