Note: Last month, Joan Claybrook of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection. During her remarks she strongly criticized U.S. motorcoach safety and federal safety regulators. Here are excerpts from her presentation.

Motorcoaches are the over-the-road regional passenger airliners of Americas highways, carrying up to 59 occupants on board for a given trip. (The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) reports that 3,700 interstate motorcoach companies are registered with the agency and are operating more than 34,000 motorcoaches. Many thousands of other motorcoaches operate wholly in intrastate commerce.

Passenger ridership is projected to substantially expand in the near future given expected increases in the cost of commercial airline travel and increasing flight delays.

Motorcoach crashes can easily result in many deaths and severe injuries. Despite these harrowing losses, the U.S. Department of Transportation does not require that motorcoaches have the same basic occupant protection safety features that are routinely designed into passenger motor vehicles.

Few safety standards

There are fewer (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) safety standards for motorcoaches than for any other motor vehicles regulated by the agency.

Motorcoaches lack critical safety features such as seatbelts; passenger seat strength standards; occupant interior impact protection; anti-ejection measures such as advanced glazing; adequate roof strength standards; rollover prevention requirements; automatic fire suppression systems; adequate on-board firefighting equipment, and interior emergency illumination of safe evacuation paths.

Yet, seatbelts are now required on European, Japanese and Australian motorcoaches. Australia responded to the need to restrain motorcoach occupants and keep them in their seats and prevent their ejection by mandating seatbelts 15 years ago. Since that mandate was issued, not a single death or disabling injury has occurred in an Australian motorcoach crash for any belted occupant.

Australia also produced a much safer and less expensive motorcoach seat design despite the protests of the industry that it was impossible to improve the safety of motorcoach seats without adding lots of extra weight that would cost the industry fuel and payload penalties.

Rollovers are the most common type of severe motorcoach crash and produce the most severe occupant trauma. These crashes are often catastrophic, with roof failures that can even involve complete roof separation, as occurred in a crash and rollover in which nine passengers were killed near Mexican Hat, Utah, on Jan. 7, 2008, and 51 of the 53 passengers were ejected.

Rollovers and fires

According to a recent research report from (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), more than half the deaths in motorcoach crashes are the result of occupant ejection from the vehicle, and ejection is the reason for 70 percent of occupant deaths in motorcoach rollovers.

Motorcoach fires have grown both in numbers and severity in recent years. There are daily media reports of motorcoach fires occurring somewhere in the U.S. Fires on motorcoaches, especially in wheel wells, engine compartments, and heating/cooling systems are an especially severe and prevalent safety problem whose proportions just became known as the result of a Volpe Transportation Center study whose findings were presented at the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (Bus) Safety Summit in March 2009. (See April 1 and April 15 issues of Bus & Motorcoach News.)

CVSA convened the safety summit because of the rapidly growing concern over the ongoing deterioration of motorcoach safety in the U.S. The Volpe study found that there was an average of more than one fire every day on a motorcoach in the U.S.

Current standards for combating the ignition and spread of fires on motorcoaches are wholly inadequate.

The deplorable state of motorcoach safety standards has been documented by the National Transportation Safety Board in nearly 70 motorcoach investigations over a span of 40 years that resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries and numerous recommendations to USDOT that have been ignored. In some of these incidents more than 20 people on board were killed in a single crash or fire.

Recommendations ignored

NTSB has issued dozens of recommendations over the years addressing all aspects of motorcoach safety, including crash protection of occupants, crash avoidance capability especially regarding catastrophic single-vehicle events involving rollovers, resistance to fire propagation and spread, and many other issues touching on motorcoach safety design, performance, and operation.

NTSB recommendations have either been closed out because of unsatisfactory responses, incomplete responses or no responses from USDOT agencies.

In recent years, Congress has held a series of hearings on motorcoach safety issues and the lack of action by USDOT to improve motorcoach safety because of its rapidly growing concern that motorcoach safety in the U.S. was adrift and that the agencies of jurisdiction were not doing their job to dramatically improve occupant safety.

(The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) has embarked on a program of research and testing to respond to the sense of urgency about dramatically improving motorcoach safety that NTSB has emphasized in its recommendations to the agency.

To date, the agency has filed in its motorcoach safety research docket several reports on how well motorcoaches respond to a rollover test, a roof crush test, and a frontal barrier test. Advocates (for Highway and Auto Safety) strongly supports the test and findings of NHTSAs frontal crash test, which is quite stringent because it definitively shows that traditional motorcoach industry claims that passengers are safe because they are "compartmentalized" and protected like eggs in an egg crate, are just not true.

Unbelted test dummies were thrown from their seats in the frontal crash test and ended up either in a jumbled pile in the central motorcoach aisle, or were propelled into or over the seatbacks in front of them. Dummies with two-point seatbelts suffered what were recorded as severe injuries. But dummies with three-point belts (including shoulder straps) were properly restrained in their seats and suffered low injury forces.

The other two tests conducted by NHTSA, however, are weak and not acceptable. One of the tests is how a motorcoach suffers structural damage in a rollover. The test is an adaptation of the current (European Uniion) test that simply topples a motorcoach from a one-meter high platform onto the ground. The test results show levels of damage that are far milder than those often suffered by motorcoaches in real-world catastrophic rollover crashes.

Artificial tests?

NHTSA says it will separately test how glazing performs with a component test using a lateral impactor, but this is not a real-world demonstration of how a motorcoach roof and sides distort to facilitate glazing failure that results in large, open portals allowing passengers to be ejected.

Once again, as with passenger vehicle rollover, NHTSA chooses to artificially separate the tests of crucially important safety features that in the real world perform in a complex, interactive manner in actual rollover crashes.

This rollover test approach, and the agencys use of a component test for motorcoach side window glazing, can lead to weak safety standards that will not adequately protect motorcoach occupants in rollover crashes.

Congress needs to direct NHTSA to address real-world motorcoach safety needs across the board both crashworthiness and crash avoidance and respond vigorously to outstanding NTSB safety recommendations on motorcoach safety.

A legislative vehicle already exists that, if enacted, will accomplish these goals. Motorcoach safety bills containing detailed, comprehensive occupant protection and motorcoach crash avoidance reforms have been introduced in both houses of Congress.

These two bills reflect a growing consensus among the NTSB, safety advocates, families that have suffered terrible losses of loved ones in disastrous motorcoach crashes and members of Congress that USDOT has failed to advance motorcoach safety in a timely fashion.

Enactment of this legislation is crucial to ensure that USDOT does not delay any longer.