I had my first experience of one of Brighton's new Volvo buses today. They are roomy, have easy stairs, reassuring grab handles, comfortable seats: but I was astonished to see that the latter had all been fitted with seat belts. Bearing in mind that the chance of a bus passenger fatality is 13 million to 1 and the proportion of these that occur while the passenger is sitting down, even unbelted, must be vanishingly small, I can only imagine that Volvo must have had a lot of these seats surplus to its express coach production line.
Commonsense suggests that most injuries to bus passengers occur when they are getting on or off the bus. If the bus driver is to wait until every passenger is seated, and belted up, before moving off, and every passenger waits until the bus stops to unbelt, all the hard-won reductions in journey times will be shot to pieces.
I can also not make any sense of the warning notice on the back of every seat. I suppose we must attribute that to Swedish/English translation difficulties.
Oooh I want to try one! Are thesebusmeisters being introduced on all the inner city routes? None of the drivers I've spoken to on the faithful 49 and 25 routes claim to know anything about them.
ReplyDeleteThe way some toddlers are allowed to clamber backwards, sideways and upside down on both the pull-down and fixed seats has often caused me to think about seatbelts for them. Either that, or tie the parents / minders up!
And precisely WHO is going to enforce this silliness- the driver, checking every seat before he moves off? sure! Or perhaps BHB are going to employ a roving army of seat belt inspectors, all with little mustaches?
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