Transport Committee on April 2nd, 2019

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Obviously, being ejected from a vehicle significantly lowers survivability and certainly makes the injury suffered more severe. Part of the exposé, if you will, that took place not long ago on CBC, as I recall, was going back to the theory that the compartmental strategy with the padded seatbacks, etc., was what everybody focused on, but side collisions or rollovers were not necessarily considered in the argument against having safety belts. When you look at videos of crash test dummies with safety belts, there's a lot of whipping side to side of heads. There is as well, in front or rear collisions, forward and back, so there are certainly, at the very least, significant soft tissue injuries, which can be a lifelong sentence. As a former insurance company guy, in auto insurance, I know that.

Looking at that aspect of it, the safety belt is maybe only one thing that should be considered. If you were designing a bus, what would you do to try to prevent some of the other activities that are going on in a crash?

[Dr. Daniel Rosenfield]

I have to concede that that's sort of beyond my level of expertise.

I will acknowledge that the first comment you made is spot-on. Belts will mitigate, but not eliminate, injuries. In fact, you see different injury patterns depending on the type of belt being worn. Certainly, as I mentioned, there's actually what's called a seat belt syndrome, where only a lap belt is worn. There's also the concern if a three-point restraint is worn inappropriately or isn't fitting correctly that you can potentially have more significant injury than if it weren't worn at all.

Again, any other sort of technology is a little bit beyond my expertise, so I'm going to stop my comments there.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

You mentioned, of course, that your focus is particularly on pediatrics. What is the threshold? What size, weight, etc., should we be considering when we think of school buses, perhaps, that are transporting elementary school and preschool kids?

[Dr. Daniel Rosenfield]

Typically, our centre actually sees kids up to 16, but of course, you can have a 15-year-old who looks like they're 25, and you can have a 19-year-old who looks like they're 13. We actually typically go more on what their body habitus is like in terms of whether they have gone through puberty and whether their growth plates have fused and things like that. I think, with respect to pediatrics, if you're talking about elementary school buses, those would certainly encompass everything under my scope.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

When we look at the interior design of buses, one aspect I think we need to consider, particularly where.... Well, it doesn't matter whether or not safety belts are present; the collision with other things in the bus, and not necessarily the seatback in front of you, obviously would contribute to all kinds of injuries, in the case where a person is unrestrained, and definitely more head injuries where the person is sitting next to a window or a stanchion. Would that be a valid observation?

[Dr. Daniel Rosenfield]

I think so. Again, that's probably more of an engineering or physics question.

I can certainly tell you from experience that we absolutely see kids who are injured from hitting things within the bus. They're actually often not necessarily severe injuries, but lower-speed potential crashes that were the equivalent of fender-benders, in which they bumped the side and they have a big laceration on the side of their head, or something in that vein, from a stanchion or a metal post or something like that.

I can't speak further than that.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

What about head to head?

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Sorry, Dr. Rosenfield, but I have to go to our next committee member.

Monsieur Aubin.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Welcome, Mr. Rosenfield. Thank you for joining us.

I listened carefully to your comments. I confess that I have some difficulty with a statistical approach, such as when you say that most accidents involving school buses happen at off-peak times. But having been a high school teacher, I get the picture.

When bus drivers are driving their routes in town and getting the children to school at about 50 kilometres an hour, the risk of an accident is low and, even if there was one at that speed, the impact would be reduced.

When I was a teacher, those were the same buses that I was on to go to the theatre or to a sports or cultural event with my students. We would be doing 90 kilometres an hour on the highway, which is more or less the standard in all provinces.

You were talking about speed just now. In your experience, is a speed limit of 90 kilometres an hour appropriate for that kind of vehicle?

[Dr. Daniel Rosenfield]

That's a good question. It's hard to answer definitively.

Obviously, the vehicles are capable of going those speeds. As I alluded to at the beginning, most fatal crashes and severe injuries occur when buses are going at that speed. It's a hard thing to say. It's more of a value judgment as to whether or not a bus.... You're at a higher risk of injuries and fatalities when you're in a bus at that speed. I guess the question is if you're going on that after-school trip, what's the value of the trip versus the relative risk?

Again, as I pointed to at the beginning of the talk, they're still exceedingly safe. The odds of kids and teachers being killed or severely injured in school bus crashes, even on highways or in off hours, are still exceedingly low and much safer than private vehicle transportation. I do need to put that grain of salt in there. If the alternative is now we send 20 children in 20 different cars to that trip, absolutely not, the school bus is 100% going to be the safest way to do that every time.

That being said, the faster it goes, the more likely if something bad happens, there's going to be a worse outcome.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you.

I ask that question because it is very important. When we say school bus, practically everyone has in mind the 47-passenger school bus we see all the time. However, in a school situation, there are many other modes of transportation. For example, a sports team with a small number of students often uses minivans long enough to take up to 12 passengers. There are also smaller school buses that can carry 20 or 25 passengers.

Do we have to look at standards that are specific to each type of vehicle? Could the three-point restraint be the common denominator for all types of transportation?

[Dr. Daniel Rosenfield]

That's a really great observation and point.

Unfortunately, we're flying blind with respect to research and evidence here in terms of relative safety. Most of the studies that have looked at school bus crashes have not distinguished between full-size buses, minibuses, van combinations, etc. It would be very hard for me to advocate for one versus the other.

In absolute terms, if you're going to implement these policies, then I think we would have to think about them pragmatically and ask if it is reasonable to expect there to be seat belts and certain things in 47-chair buses versus smaller buses where it might be more feasible. That's not my area of expertise, so I can't speak to that. I think that's certainly a very valid point.

I would just echo that we aren't guided by.... There's not even that much research out of other centres. I looked through what's coming out of the U.S. and other places around the world, and unfortunately, there's certainly nothing distinguishing between full-size buses, minibuses and so forth.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

After a lot of pressure, the government has moved up the replacement of the DOT-111s, those tanker cars that carry crude oil because it was found that they were not sufficiently impact-resistant. That transportation is for natural resources. For transporting our children, should we not be demanding stronger buses?

We fully understand the compartalization theory in a head-on collision, but the consequences are completely different with a lateral impact. Should we not simply err on the side of caution and require manufacturers to make school buses stronger, given that they are allowed to make those kinds of trips?

[Dr. Daniel Rosenfield]

I would agree with the statement that any manufacturer should make their products as safe as possible. With respect to the individual buses and how they're constructed and what compartments they have, that's not my area of expertise. I certainly can't comment more than that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Make this very short, Mr. Aubin.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Is there a difference between transporting students by school buses and transporting students by highway coaches, which are much more luxurious? Does the seriousness of the injuries differ in the two cases?

[Dr. Daniel Rosenfield]

Unfortunately, empirically, as I mentioned earlier, coach buses have not been studied. There haven't actually been a good number of large-scale epidemiologic studies to compare coach buses to school buses, so we can't actually make that comparison.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Okay.

Mr. Iacono.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Dr. Rosenfield, thank you for being here today.

I have been able to gather that you are particularly interested in preventing injuries. Let us look at the case of a school bus built according to the compartmentalization system of seating, in order to protect the students by mechanisms other than traditional seatbelts.

Is it your opinion that, today, compartmentalization is the optimal system for protecting young passengers in collisions?

[Dr. Daniel Rosenfield]

Do you mean the current compartmentalization system that exists as it stands now?

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Yes.

[Dr. Daniel Rosenfield]

All right.

Again, stating, of course, that I'm not an engineer and I'm not at the forefront of what's out there, in a little bit of the reading I did in preparing for this, I recognized there are some potential other technologies that have yet to be really formally validated, such as airbags and things like that.

Unfortunately, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I think the system they have now and that's being tested is what's available. As for whether or not there's better technology out there, I can't really speak to it.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

From your analysis of accidents, damages and injuries to victims, is that system the best there is, or is there a way to improve it? What do you suggest? Do you have any comments for us on the issue?

[Dr. Daniel Rosenfield]

The first thing I would say is that you can always improve. Until no children who are in crashes suffer any injuries or fatalities, there's always room to move. Given that we're talking about Canada's children, it's always worthy of further investment, time and innovation.

Even the compartmentalization theory has changed over the years. I know that engineers have spent lots of time investigating and testing different ways to make the compartments safe. We still see a lot of injuries from other things that are potentially related to the compartments. I think with one of the other committee members we were talking about potentially hitting stanchions and other metal things within the bus.

There certainly are a lot of places where we can work to minimize injuries, mitigate the injuries they have or prevent them altogether. There is definitely a lot of work to do from that end. As for how that work gets done and what it looks like, that's not my area of expertise, but I still see kids who get hurt on school buses and so on. Until the day when I don't see those anymore, there's room to move.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

If you had to choose one thing that we could do to improve the situations as quickly as possible, what would it be?