Get Energy Smart! NOW!

The Old Dominion’s political system and culture is often referred to as The Virginia Way which is nostalgically promoted as one “of honor, gentility and democracy”. Just like “MAGA” glosses over (ignores or even embraces) ugly parts of American history,

 In reality, this ideology bred a corrupt political class, a runaway electricity company, a university that reflected the values of donors and a school system that suffered from cronyism. This Virginia Way prevented rather than promoted the success of its stated democratic ideals.

From The Dominion Tax being whitewashed by captive legislators (many Virginia GOP) in The Dominion Scam to allowing construction of and charging ratepayers for unnecessary fossil gas power plants to building momentum for a blanket check for Dominion excess profiteering from Offshore Wind, that “runaway electricity company” certainly seems to leverage political power to boost significantly profitability. Perhaps a better description of the Old Dominion’s political structure would be “The Dominion Way” since, like Lolo, ‘whatever Dominion wants, Dominion gets’.

In the Commonwealth, sometimes it is difficult to determine whether it is the regulated utility or the regulators driving public policy. Sometimes there is greater clarity. School bus seat belts is one example.

School bus seat belts have long been a controversial and emotional issue. Analysis has been conflicted as to whether seat belts pass reasonable cost-benefit analyses (see below). Virginia does not require school buses to have seat belts (though at least one school district, Henrico County, requires them). While even without seat belts, school buses remain the safest way to transport K-12 students to school on the roads, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) “recommended that 42 states that don’t require for lap and shoulder belts on large school buses add such a requirement.” (Though, to be clear, the NHTSA does not require seat belts.) Even so, when considering school budgets and safety issues, at least some School Boards (and/or the professional staffs) have balked at the $7,000-$11,000 cost for installing seat belts (or roughly 10% additional cost to the standard diesel-powered school bus) even in the face of the NTSB recommendation and some (mainly parent) passionate citizen activist calls for them.

Enter Dominion and the Dominion Electric School Bus program. The Dominion-provided ESBs will have seat belts. Point blank. In fact, Dominion will not partner with any school system that doesn’t allow seat belts.

one of the requirements to participate in our program is the school buses must be equipped with three point safety belts. Virginia does not require seatbelts in our buses, but safety is our top priority at Dominion and we’ve said if you want to participate in our program you have got to be willing to install seatbelts on the new buses moving forward. [Dan Weekley, Dominion, 27 Jan 2020]

While this has generated enthusiasm about the Dominion ESB program, few seem to have noticed or remarked on how this is a blunt example of The Dominion Way. Leveraging resources gained via excessive profiteering from ratepayers, Dominion is dictating to public entities items that are quite explicitly public policy issues and that merit determination by public officials, accountable to the public, after discussions open to and engaging stakeholders.

To be clear, no matter where one falls in a ‘to seat belt or not to seat belt’ debate, it should concern all Virginians when a private Corporation is able to (quite literally) dictate public policy and government investment.

Some thoughts re Public Policy and School Bus Seat Belt Cost-Benefit Analysis

“All politics is local” and local politics can be messy and arouse tremendous passions as issues can be quite tangible and close to home. Whether trash collection, what time construction can start, lighting at public parks, or redistricting schools, decision-makers will have passionate and concerned people ‘in their faces’ with complex challenges of personal impact, perception, larger community, and conflicting priorities all mixed in. Seat belts on school buses are a perfect storm issue.

Let’s start with some truth …

School buses are the safest form of transportation to school. Students are [many] times safer riding to school in a school bus than riding to school in their parents’ cars. …

up to three times more school bus-related pupil deaths take place outside the bus (loading/unloading) than inside the bus.

The addition of seat belts would make already-safe school buses even safer.

While school buses are, due to design requirements and usage practices, extremely safe, not having seat belts flies in the face of how cars and car usage has changed since Ralph Nader started his crusading to make personal cars safer more than fifty years ago. For parents, who diligently secure their children’s seat belts before starting the engine, this can seem beyond odd to seemingly reckless indifference to their child’s safety to the point of negligence. Passions can be strong when it comes to seat belts and, well, pretty much no one likes hearing (or thinking about) “cost-benefit analysis” when it is their children’s lives on the line.

As suggested above, there are mixed conclusions from a long history of school bus seat belt cost-benefit analyses. And, this is not a straightforward calculation with clear-cut conclusions to draw from easily understood and universally agreed on valuations. Consider some of the cost and benefit streams:

• Cost
  • $7,000-$11,000 additional purchase cost per bus
    • plus some maintenance costs over lifecycle
  • Slower bus routes
    • As drivers have to assure students are securely buckled and students have to unbuckle, this adds time to bus routes
  • Lower bus capacity
    • “thicker seatbacks and fixed buckle spacing could cause capacity losses of 5% to 18%“
    • Potentially increasing required number of buses
  • Could lead to more dangerous transportation modes to school
    • And could worsen safety risks due to more parent driving
• Benefits
  • Fewer injuries and deaths
    • whether from accidents or bad driving
  • Reduced discipline problems on buses

Truly, the “fewer injuries and deaths” is a paramount issue here. How many “fewer” and what value to place on those injuries and deaths. While some seek to ascribe a ‘safety at any cost’ approach, that is not the reality in our personal or public lives: we do ‘price’ (consciously or unconsciously risks) and do place values — as painful as this can be to absorb if it is ‘you’/’yours’ in the calculation. While absurd to place an over $1 billion valuation on a life saved, for public policy, having a $1 valuation is equally absurd. Thus, a question that must be determined and put into public is that that ‘value’ because it will likely drive investment decisions.

As to ‘fewer’, that is another quite serious challenge. A 2010 University Transportation Center of Alabama analysis of a seat belt project concluded

found that seat belts can provide some safety benefits, especially in preventing deaths during rollovers and side-impact crashes. When they crunched years’ worth of crash data in Alabama, they estimated that statewide, seat belts could reduce fatalities by 39 percent and injuries by 13 percent.

That, however, translates to 0.13 deaths and roughly eight injuries prevented each year. “At this rate, it would take many years to save a single life in Alabama on average,” the researchers wrote in their report. Given the cost—between $7,000 and $11,000 per bus, by one estimate—they concluded that states would be better off investing in other, lower cost safety measures.

A simple reality is that ‘we’ all live/make such cost-benefit calculations, whether consciously or not, as there exist trade-offs throughout our lives, including in caring for our children.

School bus seat belts are not a cut-and-dried value proposition. Rather than a decision that a private business should dictate to public entities, the assessment of that value proposition is quite clearly one for government policy makers (whether regulators/specialists empowered/backed-up by elected officials (executive and/or legislators or by (hopefully well-informed) elected officials).