Transit Safety

Bus Accidents

In the United States and many other countries, bus travel is relatively safe, and serious accidents are rare. According to the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which contains information about fatal traffic crashes in the United States and Puerto Rico, there were 43,945 fatal traffic accidents in the United States and Puerto Rico in 2011, of which 535 (1.2 percent) involved a bus; the preponderance of fatal accidents involved either passenger cars (39.7 percent) or light trucks (37.2 percent).

In the same year, there were more than 2.7 million accidents causing injury, of which 6,000, or 0.2 percent, involved a bus. Of the 6,612,000 accidents causing property damage in 2011, only 7,000 (0.1 percent) involved a bus. Of 27,060 vehicle occupants killed in traffic accidents in 2011, only 54 were bus passengers, and of the 2,091,000 vehicle passengers injured in traffic accidents in 2011, about 13,000 were bus passengers.

The Transit Cooperative Research Program of the U.S. Transportation Research Board identified a number of practices that are associated with accident prevention in bus operations. In the area of human resources, these practices include screening potential drivers through structured interviews and work sample tests, as well as a review of their driving records and prior employment histories. Also included were providing defensive-driving training, offering incentives for maintaining a clean driving record, and educating passengers, including school children, in safe riding practices.

Management activities associated with greater safety include tracking and analyzing accidents, educating the public, identifying hazards, performing safety inspections, and supervising drivers. Operations activities associated with increased safety include locating bus stops with traffic patterns in mind, removing snow and ice during inclement weather, enforcing traffic and parking laws, and using unidentified observers and surveillance video technology on buses.

A researcher investigating data from intra-city bus routes in Uppsala, Sweden, found that several factors were related to the occurrence of bus accidents. As is true with driving accidents in general, traffic density was strongly related to accident occurrence, with the morning and evening rush hours being the most likely times for accidents to occur. The influence of heat and rain on bus accident rates was also investigated, but no evidence was found that either condition was significantly related to the occurrence of accidents, in contradiction to what some other researchers had found.

Bus Crime

Minor crimes, including theft and robbery, are typical crimes committed on buses, while violent crimes are less common. Crimes often reflect typical patterns of crime in a given city, as well as general societal factors. For instance, the increasing prevalence of electronic devices such as smartphones, which make promising targets for thieves, has been blamed for a 42 percent increase in thefts on Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses and trains from 2009 to 2011.

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