NTSB Wants Alcohol Detection in Every New School Bus

After a school bus rolled on a West Virginia highway two years ago, forcing the amputation of one boy's leg and seriously injuring two other children aboard, police quickly discovered the driver was drunk. That led to the National Transportation Safety Board to a broader discovery: Impaired school bus drivers was not an isolated problem. For the first time, the agency this week recommended that all new school buses be equipped with alcohol detection systems that can disable the bus if they detect the driver might be impaired, the AP reports. Similar systems are already used on school buses in parts of Europe.

"There's a higher expectation for school bus drivers than many other types of drivers," said Kris Poland of the NTSB's Office of Highway Safety. "We expect that the drivers are attentive, not fatigued, not impaired and are driving as safely as possible." The agency didn't estimate the cost of adding the detection systems to buses or say who would foot the bill. The kind of ignition interlock device that people charged with DUIs are routinely required to get costs about $75 to $150 to install and roughly $100 a month to monitor. Federal regulators or states could require the technology, but Congress would have to pass legislation to ensure widespread adoption.

The NTSB recommendation focuses on alcohol and not drugs partly because there aren't similar tests available for other drugs like marijuana. There also aren't clear legal standards for exactly how much of other drugs is enough to impair a driver. It follows a previous recommendation by the NTSB that Congress adopted to require alcohol detection systems in all new passenger vehicles. But that rule has yet to be rolled out because it is still caught up in the rulemaking process. Alcohol is a factor in one-third of the roughly 37,000 traffic deaths each year. Investigators struggled to nail down exact stats on how common a problem this is among school bus drivers, but they found enough evidence to convince them that alcohol detection systems are needed.