Safety Considerations in Design of New Transit Bus Seats

This paper describes the results of a program to develop advanced cantilevered transit bus seats. The Department of Transportation's Urban Mass Transportation Administration funded the $26 million Transbus Program. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part describes the results of a detailed analysis of passenger accidents on-board current transit buses. The second part describes the results of sled tests that evaluated the safety of three new cantilevered seat/sidewall section designs proposed for Transbus relative to the safety of current transit buses. The testing facilities and procedures are described, along with a summary of the results of 16 sled test runs that employed four different sizes of anthropometric dummies. The results clearly indicate that the new seats have safety characteristics superior to current transit bus seats, especially in severe crash situations.