Features Training
The truth about school buses

Even in an era of parents going the extra mile (literally) to drive their children right to a school’s doorstep, millions of children are still bussed to get their education each day.

The big yellow rig with the black stripes down the sides is not just a cultural icon, it’s also a visual indicator of the safety we want for our children, which is, of course, paramount.

The safety of the nation’s youth was also vitally important to rural school improvement pioneer Frank Cyr. In 1937, an era when motor cars were already the norm, Cyr was prompted, after seeing an overcrowded, unheated horse-drawn school bus in rural Kansas, to take school bus safety to the national stage and develop much needed standards (Columbia University Record, Sept. 8, 1995, Vol. 21, No. 1).

In 1939 he convened a conference at Columbia University’s teacher’s college that included representatives from each of the (then) 48 states, as well as specialists from various school bus manufacturers. Out of that conference came not only the ubiquitous yellow bus colour, but also 43 other school bus safety standards that are still, for the most part, enforced today.

The colour

School bus yellow is not actually yellow – not in the original name or actual colour. The first official name of the paint was National School Bus Chrome, named after the lead-chromate yellow element in the original tinting. It’s now called National School Bus Glossy Yellow. But even with yellow in the name, it’s actually a hue that resides in a colour wavelength that sits almost exactly between the red and green photoreceptors in the brain. The brain sees this kind of yellow more than most other colours because of how it’s interpreted by the brain. This was no accident.

One of the chief advisers to the 1939 conference was Dr. K. S. Gibson, a doctoral scientist who was at the forefront of the science of the “visibility curve”, which is basically how well a person sees different wavelengths of light. It was his urging, as well as his placement on the National Bureau of Standards, that had the conference end up with School Bus Yellow —and eventually the placement of the black stripes (Minimum Standards for School Buses report, 1939). 

The stripes

Firefighters can be an opinionated lot, and the lines on the side of a bus are the cause of many a firehouse table or online discussion. Let’s look at the truth about school bus stripes.  

First, to explain the striping, it should be noted that each bus body is required to have “rub rails”, which are reinforcement bars that run front to back on the bus. These enhancements make the bus stronger during impact, and especially a lateral hit to the vehicle. 

Recent internet memes and a heavily visited YouTube video (over four million views by a self-proclaimed school bus “expert”) have spread the misinformation that the stripes are to indicate demarcation lines to guide fire department extrication efforts. There is this generally accepted idea that the bottom black line aligns with the interior floor, the midline with the seat bottoms, and the top line with passenger shoulder height or the top of the seat. It’s unclear why the idea was hatched to aid extrication in the first place, but in the end, it’s (mostly) a myth.

To disprove it, I’ve walked up to an empty school bus more than once, introduced myself to the driver, and measured out the floor/seat/top-of-seat distances to see if they align with the outer black stripes. They typically don’t. But aside from my own anecdotal evidence, and contrary to popular belief, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which provides the standards for school bus safety, does not require the striping to be in alignment with those black lines. The lines may be close to alignment, but they’re not there for that. 

Two things coincided with the inclusion of the black striping along with the adopted yellow colouring, though there is no hard data on exactly when it started being adopted. The first was segregation. In the era of bussing Black children to separate schools in separate buses, those “Black” buses were required to have the front wheel covers painted black to indicate the race of the children on board (Smithsonian Magazine “The History of How School Buses Became Yellow” by Bryan Greene).

The second was an idea originally put forth by Dr. Gibson, the visual scientist at the original conference: that breaking up the solid yellow body, ideally with black striping, makes the bus even more visible. Desegregation happened, but the black on yellow contrast from the painted wheel covers brought back Gibson’s striping idea, and it was adopted. It’s another item that is incorrectly thought of as part of the standard. It is not, and, if you start looking closely at the buses in your neighbourhood, you’ll begin to see ones with red or green striping as well since there is no hard and fast rule on stripe colour.

What it means for extrication

Knowing the weak and strong points of the bus, how it moves and how its integrity gets compromised, are critical for extrication efforts. It’s also important to recognize that your fire department may be involved in extrication efforts on some bus configuration outliers, like EV buses or propane fueled vehicles. It should also be noted that we’re only talking about school buses here, but there are also buses converted to RVs, city transport system buses, and de-commissioned buses that are bought on the used market and then used by churches, sports teams, etc. 

So, first, the good news: school buses are considered the safest vehicles on the road. A school bus is over 70 times safer for a child than riding to school by car (National Safety Council). The 1939 conference was the first, but not the last. It reconvenes every five years to revisit safety standards, and there are several current measures to protect North American kids.

Significant frame, body, and roof reinforcements, and the creation of the roof-into-body roll cage, are required now. The interior of a school bus is a seriously protected space, and so it should be, considering the cargo. Consequently, in terms of extrication, it’s thankfully rare that a true bus body disassembly is going to happen. If you research “school bus accident” images, you’ll notice that even in high impact collisions, it appears that the front or rear of the bus sustain the most damage. 

Just because bus extrication may be a rare event does not mean you don’t train on gaining entry into a deformed bus to get to victims, lifting the bus, or knowing the anatomy of the bus body. It’s possible you’ll perform seat displacements or post removals. Each of these actions can be difficult, especially if children are involved, and since it’s a bus, quite possibly a multi-casualty incident as well. 

Which brings us back to those stripes. To hopefully put an old argument to rest: the black lines on a bus do indeed indicate impact reinforcement “rub rails”. During extrication efforts, these areas may need extra work, consideration, or a work-around if you’re performing disassembly. But, in the end, they don’t usually align with floor/seat/seat top and shouldn’t be used as guides. It’s a myth that needs to be dispelled and inserted into training. 

Are school buses safe? Yes. Will we ever ride on a bus extrication call? Possibly. That’s why we still train on them. Though a bus call is rare, I always go back to that old fire service axiom: “Never say never. Never say always.”

Chief Dave Robertson has 25 years in the fire service in five different departments, from busy urban systems to wildland to rural/semi-rural. He has instructed for his fire departments, fire academies, paramedic schools, private fire institutions, and now as the deputy chief of training for Lambton Shores Fire Rescue. He is fueled by a sincere and robust passion to make the fire service better.