Buses play a key role in student transport by transporting students to and from school. They often have a high seating capacity and a high degree of safety compared to other modes of transportation. The use of buses in student transport varies worldwide, and may take the form of. When loading or unloading students, yellow school buses are given traffic priority.
Their red warning lights and stop signs allow them to stop traffic. In China , purpose-built vehicles for transporting schoolchildren are not commonly used. The earliest professional school bus in China appeared in October Compared with many developed countries, Chinese schools have a relatively short history of providing transportation services.
It was not until that the first private schools began to offer bus services. Due to a lack of buses, it is common for buses to be overloaded with schoolchildren. According to a article by Beijing Evening News , there are around 90 million students in China who need to ride school buses, which amounts to requiring over 1 million legally safe school buses. However, in , the number of safe school buses just eclipsed 10,, far below the recommended threshold.
Consequently, accidents happen frequently, and 18, children die from traffic accidents every year. Furthermore, legally safe school buses that are manufactured in China are largely exported and rarely seen in China, further contributing to a lack of supply of safe school buses. The frequency of school bus-involved traffic accidents has raised concerns throughout China.
In , 41 primary and middle school students were killed in school bus accidents, including a collision between a kindergarten bus and a coal van in Gansu province. The nine-seat minibus was carrying 64 people: the driver, a teacher, and 62 children. Both adults and 19 children were killed, and all surviving 43 students were injured.
