June 22, 2004

School bus windows: our disingenuousness revealed

In your May 3 item about the developmentally disabled child who died after sticking his head through an open school bus window, you wrote: "[the mother's] lawyer, Robert York, said in particular that the fatality could have been averted 'if the bus's windows had been blocked from opening more than a few inches'. The article makes no mention of what such a recommendation might mean for the safety of school bus passengers in other situations, such as emergency evacuations." (Emphasis added).

The highlighted portion of your statement is provocative indeed. We would be wise not to impose limits on bus-window openings for the purpose of protecting the (lamentably disabled) few, at the possible expense of the safety of the millions of children who ride school buses every day.

The problem with this reasoning, as everyone who has seen a school bus knows, is that school bus windows are not designed for evacuations. I offer a visual aid.

As you will note, school bus windows include two rectangular glass panes, an upper and a lower, of equal size. The lower is stationary, and cannot be opened. A window is opened by lowering the upper glass pane so that it is positioned directly inside the lower glass pane. The largest opening that can be achieved is approximately the size of one of the rectangular glass panes. School children are not instructed to try to exit the bus through these windows in the event of an emergency, presumably in part because the windows openings are smaller than school-aged children.

Instead, school buses are provided with an emergency exit door at the rear, and multiple emergency windows (see the picture linked above). Emergency windows are designed such that the entire window unit, including BOTH glass panes and the window frame are removed, providing a realistic evacuation exit. The efficacy of emergency windows is not in the least dependent on how far the individual upper glass pane can be opened.

In light of this, it is no wonder that "the article makes no mention of what such a recommendation might mean for the safety of school bus passengers in other situations, such as emergency evacuations." Your somber suggestion that limiting the amoung bus windows can be opened would hinder school-bus evacuations, while eminently reasonable on the surface, is in fact totally misleading. No matter whether this is a result of intellectual dishonesty or simple laziness on your part, in my view it seriously compromises your credibility.

Whether or not the underlying lawsuit is meritorious, your disingenuous commentary has betrayed you as a cynic who is willing to distort the truth to appeal to people in the name of common sense to join your tort-law reform crusade. I do not believe such tactics are honorable or, ultimately, persuasive.
-- C. Donald Stevens, Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, Washington, D.C.

Posted by Walter Olson at June 22, 2004 12:22 AM
Comments

Having actually ridden school buses myself when I was younger (unlike th person who sent this in, obviously), I assure you that even many high-school students can (and do) fit through the windows on a bus, to say nothing of younger children.

"Your somber suggestion that school-children cannot fit through the windows, while eminently reasonable on the surface, is in fact totally misleading." And total crap, I might add.

Posted by: Deoxy at June 22, 2004 10:16 AM

I think it would be a stretch to say Mr. Olson was being disingenuous when he made mention of the original article's lack of information regarding possible evacuation issues

From what you have described, limiting window movement would not impede actual evactuation routes since the windows were never intended as such. Those points all seems quite reasonable and I tend to agree. But the thing is when I read the original post, that was one of the two concerns I had (the other, after spending far too many trips to school on a stiflingly hot bus, was whether there could be adequate airflow).

It seems to me that the sentence was not put in there to indicate that there would be a definite safety issue. Instead, I beleive it was for people like myself, who considered the possibility that such a change would be a safety issue. In short, I don't see a problem with anybody announcing a concern they might have.

Posted by: Mike O'Leary at June 22, 2004 02:41 PM