Coaches are safe
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• More than eight out of 10 people believe coaches are safe, according to a Mori poll which was taken before a series of coach crashes claimed 24 lives.
Initially Barry Hoye of the Bus and Coach Council said the results demonstrated "the high customer standards that the bus and coach industry can provide". But he has since admitted that the results of the survey, which was conducted between March and May, would have been affected by the accidents.
Since the crash at Auxerre in France on 3 June, which claimed 11 lives, there have been nine major crashes involving British coaches — the equivalent of one a week over the past three months. The latest incident was two weeks ago on the Al in Northumberland when one man died and 22 people were injured.
Iloye says the BCC is now backing the Department of Transport in urging operators of vehicles first used between April 1974 and April 1984, to fit speed limiters ahead of the obligatory date next April.
And it is pressing for seatbelts to be fitted to all seats of new vehicles. But Hoye says it is unlikely that older vehicles will be retrofitted with seatbelts, because of the cost — he estimates a minimum of 21,000 for 50-seat singledeckers.
However, he says seatbelts are only effective if there is a back to front shunt. Six out of the nine coaches involved in crashes over the past three months ended up on their sides, and would probably not have benefited from seatbelts, he says.
A chief fire officer who visited the Al crash scene two weeks ago, says lives could be saved if steel roll bars were built into coach bodywork.