On Twitter, I tend to follow a lot of libertarian and anarcho-capitalist accounts. I am extremely sympathetic to anti-statist arguments, but it is always important to subject even (especially) ideas that we agree with to the same level of consideration that we subject those to which we disagree with.
Consider this image that ended up in my Twitter timeline where someone thinks they’re making a clever criticism,
In the United States, there are state laws that require children riding in a car to be in special seats until a certain age, and then after that they must wear seat belts. School buses in the United States, however, almost never have seat belts.
So that’s a case of sheer hypocrisy, right? The government mandates that my child wear a seat belt in my car, but most mornings he rides a school bus that isn’t even equipped with seat belts.
Not so fast. As this 2010 article posted on Today notes, there are actually good reasons that there generally aren’t seat belts on school buses (emphasis added),
About 440,000 public school buses carry 24 million children more than 4.3 billion miles a year, but only about six children die each year in bus accidents, according to annual statistics compiled the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. About 800 children, by contrast, die every year walking, biking or being driven to school in cars or other passenger vehicles, said Ron Medford, the agency’s deputy director.
That’s because designers of modern school buses don’t trust squirmy children to use seat belts properly. Instead, they use a passive system called compartmentalization. Bus seats aren’t packed so closely together just to maximize capacity (although that’s one reason); they’re spaced tightly and covered with 4-inch-thick foam to form a protective bubble.
In a crash, “the child will go against the seat, and that will absorb most of the impact,” said John Hamilton, transportation director for the Jackson County, Fla., school board. “Plus, it’s a safety device so that they won’t be projecting through the air.”
Cost and risks of seat belts
School and transportation officials cite two other main reasons for declining to install seat belts:
• Cost. Separate studies by the NHTSA and the University of Alabama concluded that installing seat belts would add anywhere from $8,000 to $15,000 to the cost of a new bus while having little to no impact on safety.
Seat belts would also take up room that’s now used for seats, meaning “fewer children can be accommodated on each row,” according to the Alabama study. That could require school systems to increase their bus fleets by as much as 15 percent just to transport the same number of pupils, it suggested.
“The cost of installing seat belts on every bus at once is prohibitive,” said the authors of the Alabama study, the October release of which was highly anticipated by school officials nationwide because it is among the first large-scale analyses of the subject.
. . .
“Most school bus passenger fatalities are because the passenger’s seating position was in direct line with the crash forces, and seat belts would not have prevented these fatalities,” Medford, deputy head of the NHTSA, told school transportation officials at a meeting in Washington in April.
The lack of seat belts on buses is a result of the sort of sensible cost/benefit analysis which conservatives and libertarians frequently complain is lacking in many regulatory decisions.