Whole nation calling for safe school buses

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The news about a bus accident has been headlines for days in China. On Nov 16, a kindergarten’s small school bus crashed into a heavy-duty truck in Gansu, a northwest province. The death toll has risen to 21.

In the accident, there were 64 people in the bus. Except one driver and one teacher, they are all children. But astonishingly, the so-called school bus was a Toyota Haice-based Brilliance light-duty bus with 9 seats originally– smaller than Ford Transit, which means the overload rate was 611%!

How can they stuff 62 children into a 9-seater bus? They removed 7 seats of the bus, except the driver’s and the front passenger seat, and then installed 3 rows of slat benches longitudinally. But in fact, the children cannot sit on the benches unless most of their friends have got off, because of the limited room. In a word, the school bus was like a farmer’s van and the children were like vegetables inside.

The kindergarten’s headmaster is not to blame.Instead, he is a good man. Considering many children lives 5 or more kilometers away from the kindergarten, without the crowed school bus, many of them will refuse to receive education.

Most school buses in towns and smaller cities have similar overload rates, because many children have to choose between crowed bus and drop-out. For most schools and kindergartens, a 200,000 RMB (€23.2k) standard school bus is not a small expenditure, and the poorer families are unwilling to pay more than 2 RMB (€0.23) a day for the commute. Adequate school buses for the whole country will cost about 50 billion RMB (€5.8b), excluding fuel consumption and drivers’ payment –nobody can pay.

Where is the government? The purchasing of state-financed vehicles costs 80 billion RMB (€9.3b) in 2010, equivalent to 200,000 Audi A6s, but the sales volume of standard school buses was only 900.

This accident has awoken the Chinese people. The whole nation is calling for safe school buses. We hope the government has also been shocked. Even if they don’t want to pay much for education, at least pay for some for children’s lives.