Ask yourself why you don’t need a seatbelt on a bus. Then you know why physics dictates that the driver of that truck is probably very dead and the children are probably mostly scared.
Tldr: there is a massive difference in mass, its like the truck driving full speed into a wall.
Bigger problem with no belts is bus driving into wall. Or another bus. Or rolling. Or hitting a bump that launches kids into the ceiling.
But yes, generally it’s safer due to a few things related to their mass. Primarily, conservation of momentum and material strength/crumble physics. A truck or car in motion suddenly transferring that energy to a bus is going to have that energy distributed over a much larger mass, meaning the bus moves much less quickly. It also has more material to crumble and absorb the impact, making the collision more inelastic, distributing kinetic energy into deforming the metal instead of pushing the bus and occupants forward. Accordingly, it doesn’t increase acceleration as quickly as you might expect which is what causes injury (the rate of change in acceleration is called ‘jerk’, btw, which is a pretty accurate name in collisions).
The truck driver also benefits from the crumble of both vehicles reducing the kinetic energy, a bit. But his vehicle has a lot less material to crumble before that material includes his organs. That’s also assuming the vehicle isn’t short enough to have the front end slip under the bus’s bumper leaving their face to absorb the impact.
Also school buses are designed to put the kids very high up off the ground. The video is a good example of how, even with an outrageously tall truck, hitting a schoolbus will do damage primarily to its undercarriage. The engine block of the truck was well below the school bus seats at time of impact.
Back in my day, the only seat belts on a bus would have been lap belts.
And with the backs of the seats being all metal - including the top edge - any crash would have resulted in all the dentists, denturists, and periodontists in the region becoming filthy fucking rich in just a year or five.
I mean, when even a one-on-three for both the upper and lower costing about that of a new car, doing that for 20-50 kids ends up being one hell of a payday for any implant specialist.
Ask yourself why you don’t need a seatbelt on a bus. Then you know why physics dictates that the driver of that truck is probably very dead and the children are probably mostly scared.
Tldr: there is a massive difference in mass, its like the truck driving full speed into a wall.
You do realise the thing under the video is a “source link”, and takes you to a website where there is more information on the crash?
So no need to speculate, the drivers of both vehicles went to the hospital for apparently minor injuries, as did 2 children from either vehicle.
Thanks. Read that later, you are correct and I’m happy they are all fine. :)
Bigger problem with no belts is bus driving into wall. Or another bus. Or rolling. Or hitting a bump that launches kids into the ceiling.
But yes, generally it’s safer due to a few things related to their mass. Primarily, conservation of momentum and material strength/crumble physics. A truck or car in motion suddenly transferring that energy to a bus is going to have that energy distributed over a much larger mass, meaning the bus moves much less quickly. It also has more material to crumble and absorb the impact, making the collision more inelastic, distributing kinetic energy into deforming the metal instead of pushing the bus and occupants forward. Accordingly, it doesn’t increase acceleration as quickly as you might expect which is what causes injury (the rate of change in acceleration is called ‘jerk’, btw, which is a pretty accurate name in collisions).
The truck driver also benefits from the crumble of both vehicles reducing the kinetic energy, a bit. But his vehicle has a lot less material to crumble before that material includes his organs. That’s also assuming the vehicle isn’t short enough to have the front end slip under the bus’s bumper leaving their face to absorb the impact.
Also school buses are designed to put the kids very high up off the ground. The video is a good example of how, even with an outrageously tall truck, hitting a schoolbus will do damage primarily to its undercarriage. The engine block of the truck was well below the school bus seats at time of impact.
Back in my day, the only seat belts on a bus would have been lap belts.
And with the backs of the seats being all metal - including the top edge - any crash would have resulted in all the dentists, denturists, and periodontists in the region becoming filthy fucking rich in just a year or five.
I mean, when even a one-on-three for both the upper and lower costing about that of a new car, doing that for 20-50 kids ends up being one hell of a payday for any implant specialist.