Transport committee  Thanks so much. It was a pleasure.

Transport committee  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

Transport committee  It's a really tough question. Again, unfortunately, this would be more my opinion as opposed to what's rooted in evidence, so I'm actually going to hold off on that, because I think we should be guided by research and not one individual opinion.

Transport committee  When you say “the safety arm”, do you mean the one in front of the school bus that prevents children from...?

Transport committee  Again, because that's never been individually evaluated, I wouldn't say that specifically. I would say that it's some sort of system that prevents children from being hit in front, whether or not that's a camera, a loud alarm or flashing lights. A lot of these have been piloted i

Transport committee  I don't want to call it low-hanging fruit because it's obviously very complicated logistically and practically, and I won't even begin to think about all those down the line. That's not my area of expertise or knowledge. At this point, however, certainly we do know that well-fitt

Transport committee  Because bus crashes in Canada are so rare...an upcoming study is looking at the last decade and specifics around the actual crash. I wish the results were published; they're coming in the next couple of months. In the absence of that, we do know that it's very rare, one or fewer

Transport committee  Yes, when this meeting was originally scheduled, my co-witness was the new chief at St. Mike's, who is the lead author on that study using the Canadian hospital injury reporting and prevention program. She has that data. Unfortunately, she's been out of the country, and I haven't

Transport committee  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 combin

Transport committee  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.

Transport committee  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.

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

Transport committee  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, s

Transport committee  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 th

Transport committee  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 potent