By Thomas Frank
USA Today
WASHINGTON — In the days after 15 passengers were killed in a March 12 tour bus crash near New York City, authorities inspected 164 motor coaches around the state. What they found was disturbing.
State inspectors found 41 buses with safety violations so severe that they ordered the bus to stop running or the driver to stop driving. Some drivers didn’t have a logbook showing how many hours they had worked — a requirement meant to prevent driver fatigue, a leading cause of bus crashes.
“That’s not a good thing,” said Stephen Keppler, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, a coalition of state and federal safety officials. “Frankly what it says is we need to spend more energy trying to implement safety actions.”
The nation’s 3,900 motor coach companies transport 750 million passengers a year, and the National Transportation Safety Board calls motor coaches “among the safest vehicles on the road.” About 15 passengers are killed annually — a tiny fraction of the 6,800 passengers who die each year in all motor vehicle accidents.
Despite a generally safe record, however, the motor coach industry is facing increasing regulation and greater scrutiny of safety rules. Safety advocates such as Keppler contend that loopholes in regulations endanger passengers. And Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., is urging the Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to act on long-standing safety proposals that would increase oversight of operators and make buses safer. He wrote LaHood after the New York crash and a bus crash two days later in New Jersey that killed two passengers.
“When crashes happen, they’re catastrophic because motor coaches aren’t equipped with some of the most basic safety protections,” said Jackie Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a road-safety group.
In 2008, for instance, 17 passengers died and 39 were injured when a motor coach went off a bridge near Dallas. The NTSB blamed the deaths and injuries in part on “the lack of an adequate occupant protection system,” which includes seat belts, strong roofs and glazed windows. “Ejected passengers are more likely to be killed,” the NTSB said.
Even so, motor coaches are not required to have seat belts for passengers, and a recent Department of Transportation proposal to mandate them would not take effect for years. The DOT last year barred bus and truck drivers from sending text messages while driving and is proposing to bar them from making non-emergency cellphone calls.
Despite the efforts, the NTSB says federal response is “unacceptable” to its broad proposal to protect motor coach passengers with improvements such as stronger roofs. The board is investigating the recent New York crash.
“The NTSB first recommended seat belts on motor coaches in 1968,” Gillan said. “When you have a motor coach going 65 miles per hour, passengers are violently tossed around. Half are killed because of ejection.”
The DOT has struggled for years to conduct comprehensive audits for motorcoach operators. Such audits aim to ensure the companies are complying with myriad safety rules that include having bus drivers who speak English and are healthy enough to drive for extended periods. “Only a small percentage” of bus and truck companies get audits because they are time-consuming and costly, the DOT said in a 2004 legal notice.
More than 700 of the 3,100 motorcoach operators licensed by the DOT have not been audited in three years, records show, and 467 have never been audited. That’s typically because they are new companies, which are allowed to operate temporarily without a full audit.
Federal and state officials conduct about 100,000 “roadside” inspections of individual buses and drivers, records show. But those reviews are “only a snapshot of one piece of the company — one bus and one driver,” said Peter Pantuso, CEO of the American Bus Association, a trade group of motorcoach operators.
“You’re not looking at drug— and alcohol—testing, records for drivers’ logs, their insurance,” Pantuso said. “You’re really not seeing the company itself.”
The DOT revised its audit program in December to add “safety interventions” that take less time than a full audit and focus on a company’s specific shortcomings.
“The old system had a single tool — the compliance review,” DOT spokesman Duane DeBruyne said, using another term for a safety audit. “This allows us to touch carriers more effectively because we’re pinpointing areas of concern. Going forward, you will see less and less compliance reviews.”
For Keppler of the safety alliance, the biggest problem is a restriction enacted by Congress in 2005. It bars police from inspecting commercial vehicles along roadways unless there is an “imminent or obvious hazard.”
That forces inspectors to check buses at destinations such as casinos and amusements parks.
Keppler finds the restriction ridiculous. “We need to be able to do random roadside stops to keep motor coaches honest,” he said.
Copyright 2011 Gannett Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserved