As i said in another comment, busses intentionally do not have Mansfield Bars so a vehicle rear ending the bus goes under instead of transferring all of the force of the impact into the bus.
The bus is tall for two main reasons. First, to avoid getting high-centered on bumps. Since the rear wheels are fairly far forward on the bus, and the tail sticks out behind them so far. Notice that on a semi trailer, the wheels are near the very back of the trailer:
Think about how steep a slope would need to be in order for the back tail of the trailer to scrape the ground. Even with the Mansfield bar shown in the image, it’s still an extremely steep slope, right? Just eyeballing this image, it looks like about 30° of difference, which is an absurd “the truck would never even realistically be driving on that” slope:
Now let’s compare that to a bus:
Notice that the tail sticks out behind the wheels a lot farther? And notice how the tail would hit the ground on a steep driveway or rail crossing a lot sooner? It only looks like about 10° of difference before the tail hits the ground:
The tail of a bus can easily land on top of a steep hill (lifting the rear wheels off the ground, and effectively immobilizing the entire bus) if the tail is too low. Or more commonly, the rear wheels will get stuck in a dip (like a rain gutter) while the tail and front wheels are on the ground.
“Just move the rear wheels back, so the tail won’t land on anything” I hear some people starting to type out. Except that would inevitably prevent the bus from making necessary turns. Busses need to be able to fit into residential areas to pick up and drop off kids. Residential areas tend to have narrower streets, more street parking, and tighter turns. Semi trailers don’t need to fit into those smaller side streets, and are okay with a wider turn radius. So semi trailers are able to keep the wheels way back at the end of the trailer. But since a bus needs to be able to fit into those tighter residential areas, they need to have the wheels set closer to the front of the bus, so they can make those tighter turns.
The second reason the bus is tall (and I’d argue, the most important reason), is that lowering the bus or reducing the mass would increase the risk to the kids inside of the bus. By allowing the car to slide under the bus, a lot of the kinetic energy is distributed vertically, (picking up the tail of the bus and pushing the rear-ending vehicle down) instead of directing it into crumpling the back of the bus. Because the back of a bus has very little room for crumple zones. The back seats are essentially right up against the rear wall of the bus. If you lower the bus and expect it to crumple, you’re going to crush kids. And if you lower the mass, you’ve just given 60-70 kids permanent whiplash because the bus was pushed too hard. A pragmatic vehicle engineer who remembers their humanities courses could easily argue that the design shouldn’t intentionally shatter twenty kids’ femurs (and give every kid in the bus whiplash) just to save one negligent driver’s life.
Modern school bus designs are basically the culmination of engineering for a very specific set of requirements: 1) keep kids safe, 2) be able to fit into residential areas so the bus can pick up/drop off near the kids houses (which helps keep them safe), and 3) avoid getting high-centered on anything. And “keeping people who rear-end it safe” wasn’t on the list of requirements. A Mansfield bar at the back of the bus would defeat at least one of those requirements, by making high-centering much more common. The needs of the many (the kids) outweigh the needs of the few (the rear-ender) in this case.
This is an explanation why the dumbass bus is shaped like it is, not whether it’s safer thaan the conventional bus designs, that the rest of the world uses.
Saying this can’t get over bumps or make tight turns is just being stuck up your own ass.
The US has busses like that too. They drive bus routes that keep them on the main roads, instead of going into all the residential backroads and side streets where they would get stuck. Do you think buses just drive whatever route they want, without any forethought? Actual planning goes into that route, not just for getting people from A to B, but also for ensuring the bus is physically able to fit. And school busses simply use different dimensions, to be able to expand their potential routes.
I read or was told at one point as a kid that that was an intentional feature on busses- they made the floor that high on purpose to make them safer for the occupants- instead of a rear collision hitting the frame head on eith their grill, and transferring all that momentum to the occupants, they were hitting the bus with their windshield/ chasis, and, much of the force that did transfer would be pushing the bus up because they were going under it like a wedge
They didn’t count on a society so absolutely idiotic that they would make trucks practically as high as a school bus deck legal for people to drive without a special licence and express, present purpose.
You’re assuming a perfectly rigid system. The school bus has a lot of mass in front of the rear wheels and under the hood. But behind the rear wheels, it’s basically just aluminum sheeting bolted onto the frame, and children sitting in seats, packed in like sardines. That means the mass at the front of the bus is actually working against you, because you run the risk of sandwiching all of the kids at the back of the bus. If the tail of a school bus crumples, you’ve just shattered 20 kids’ femurs and the fire department is going to spend the next 6 hours cutting them all out of the wreckage. The ideal method is to direct as much energy away from crumpling the frame as possible. And the best way (aside from adding a cow-catcher wedge to the back of the bus, to fling them off to one side or the other) is by turning it into vertical force that lifts the tail, instead of crumpling directly into it.
The goal of safety design of vehicles is to dissipate as much energy as possible, at no expense to one or the other side.
This is still a rather mild accident of a pasanger vehicle rear-ending a bus. But it’s made so much worse simply because of both-sided idiotic vehicle designs.
Most of the world realised that and rectified it rather qucikly.
One car getting under another car is never the “safe” solution.
Are you talking about ideal safety design, or American design IRL?
Because weve been in a weight and height arms-race for decades explicitly because whoever weighs more and is higher is safer, at the expense of the other vehicle.
The cars I’m talking about are far from ideal. Ideal cars would look awful, and since, “for some reason”, we’re very touchy about what a car should look like, it’s a shape of an inefficient, unsafe brick.
But yes, the issue is the arms race, as you’ve put it. And it’s starting to infect Europe as well, so education on vehicle safety is paramount.
Vechicle safety is not “as long as I’m in a tank - I’m safe, and that’s all that matters”. (This is not aimed at you)
The 100% decapitation is a bit outrageous. That isn’t true. Even in rural areas, school buses do not stop in places where there is any risk of a highway speed collision. Which also lowers the risk of death anyone in a smaller car.
And there are reasons beyond them being built on medium duty truck chassis, that in the US school buses sit that high. Part of the idea is, that if the bus gets rear ended, whatever hits you get deflected down and under the bus. This makes an accident much less likely to injure passengers in the back.
You’ve just watched a video of it happening, and you tell me “that doesn’t happen”
I understand the idea, I’m saying it’s a dumbass idea. Might have worked in 1940s when the “school bus” was designed, but it has no place in today’s world.
The whole idea “if I’m in a tank, I’m safe, I don’t care about the cars under me” is the exactly ass-backwards thinking that leads to the ridiculous “trucks” being so popular in the US.
You seem incapable of wanting to think past your nose. And do not want to consider why something is designed the way it is. You just want to be outraged and hate on something and someone. This conversion is at an end.
fuck if i know, i don’t know it either. there are a shitton of dialects tho. How general or specific do you want to get? I’m only an amateur linguist so like, that’s the quality you’re getting here dude
Dumbass too big american car smashes into a dumbass american bus that is so high up that a dumbass american car that’s too large can get under it.
Imagine if that was a smaller car. 100% decapitation.
Edit: Some pics for the angry americans:
That would be easily solved with a Mansfield bar, should be mandatory on buses that high.
As i said in another comment, busses intentionally do not have Mansfield Bars so a vehicle rear ending the bus goes under instead of transferring all of the force of the impact into the bus.
Yeah, busses carry people, not cargo.
Yeah that’s a fair point, I wonder if is not possible to have something like a Mansfield bar but independent of the passenger zone.
As I said in another comment the american bus design is dumbass to begin with.
A Mansfield bar would still prevent decapitation on mild rear-end situation with a smaller car.
We are all personally responsible for the design of our vehicles so thank you for pointing that out we’ll bring it up at the next meeting
I love that you said it sarcastically, like it was something impossible.
That’s exactly how changes happen lmao
Correct! That’s the cheap option at least.
The expensive solution is to reduce the mass of the passenger vehicle and lower the bus. Maybe even put the engine of the bus in the back.
The bus is tall for two main reasons. First, to avoid getting high-centered on bumps. Since the rear wheels are fairly far forward on the bus, and the tail sticks out behind them so far. Notice that on a semi trailer, the wheels are near the very back of the trailer:
Think about how steep a slope would need to be in order for the back tail of the trailer to scrape the ground. Even with the Mansfield bar shown in the image, it’s still an extremely steep slope, right? Just eyeballing this image, it looks like about 30° of difference, which is an absurd “the truck would never even realistically be driving on that” slope:
Now let’s compare that to a bus:
Notice that the tail sticks out behind the wheels a lot farther? And notice how the tail would hit the ground on a steep driveway or rail crossing a lot sooner? It only looks like about 10° of difference before the tail hits the ground:
The tail of a bus can easily land on top of a steep hill (lifting the rear wheels off the ground, and effectively immobilizing the entire bus) if the tail is too low. Or more commonly, the rear wheels will get stuck in a dip (like a rain gutter) while the tail and front wheels are on the ground.
“Just move the rear wheels back, so the tail won’t land on anything” I hear some people starting to type out. Except that would inevitably prevent the bus from making necessary turns. Busses need to be able to fit into residential areas to pick up and drop off kids. Residential areas tend to have narrower streets, more street parking, and tighter turns. Semi trailers don’t need to fit into those smaller side streets, and are okay with a wider turn radius. So semi trailers are able to keep the wheels way back at the end of the trailer. But since a bus needs to be able to fit into those tighter residential areas, they need to have the wheels set closer to the front of the bus, so they can make those tighter turns.
The second reason the bus is tall (and I’d argue, the most important reason), is that lowering the bus or reducing the mass would increase the risk to the kids inside of the bus. By allowing the car to slide under the bus, a lot of the kinetic energy is distributed vertically, (picking up the tail of the bus and pushing the rear-ending vehicle down) instead of directing it into crumpling the back of the bus. Because the back of a bus has very little room for crumple zones. The back seats are essentially right up against the rear wall of the bus. If you lower the bus and expect it to crumple, you’re going to crush kids. And if you lower the mass, you’ve just given 60-70 kids permanent whiplash because the bus was pushed too hard. A pragmatic vehicle engineer who remembers their humanities courses could easily argue that the design shouldn’t intentionally shatter twenty kids’ femurs (and give every kid in the bus whiplash) just to save one negligent driver’s life.
Modern school bus designs are basically the culmination of engineering for a very specific set of requirements: 1) keep kids safe, 2) be able to fit into residential areas so the bus can pick up/drop off near the kids houses (which helps keep them safe), and 3) avoid getting high-centered on anything. And “keeping people who rear-end it safe” wasn’t on the list of requirements. A Mansfield bar at the back of the bus would defeat at least one of those requirements, by making high-centering much more common. The needs of the many (the kids) outweigh the needs of the few (the rear-ender) in this case.
Thank you for not giving a brain dead response. I saw so many people arguing for things that would get hundreds to thousands of kids killed.
Thank you for giving a braindead response whithout having a slightest clue what you’re talking about.
deleted by creator
Why?
I have ADHD, but I don’t see what in their answer made you believe they have ADHD. Is it the fact they are knowledgeable about a subject?
Much text = smart. Must be the ADHDs.
Have you never been outside the US?
This is an explanation why the dumbass bus is shaped like it is, not whether it’s safer thaan the conventional bus designs, that the rest of the world uses.
Saying this can’t get over bumps or make tight turns is just being stuck up your own ass.
The US has busses like that too. They drive bus routes that keep them on the main roads, instead of going into all the residential backroads and side streets where they would get stuck. Do you think buses just drive whatever route they want, without any forethought? Actual planning goes into that route, not just for getting people from A to B, but also for ensuring the bus is physically able to fit. And school busses simply use different dimensions, to be able to expand their potential routes.
Wait, are you saying the US roads are too narrow for that type of bus?
The US just cannot use a metric bus! It’s not compatible!
Ok be real, we’re taking about the USA here, they’re not going to reduce the mass of anything.
Certainly not shootings.
Lol
If someone is dumb enough to not see the giant yellow thing covered in flashing lights and crash into it they deserve to eat steel.
Dumbass american take 🦅
Go take your angry ass back to reddit, begone bus-obsessed weirdo who must comment upon every comment.
I’d rather be bus-obsessed than say that “if you make a mistake, you deserve to die”
I’m okay with being a weirdo in the eyes of an american. I’ve seen what you worship.
Btw, I’m not the one who’s posting about reddit on Lemmy, so that’s a bit of a self-own on your part.
I read or was told at one point as a kid that that was an intentional feature on busses- they made the floor that high on purpose to make them safer for the occupants- instead of a rear collision hitting the frame head on eith their grill, and transferring all that momentum to the occupants, they were hitting the bus with their windshield/ chasis, and, much of the force that did transfer would be pushing the bus up because they were going under it like a wedge
Exactly, would you rather an accident kill a dozen innocent students or 1-2 dumbass(es) who rear ended a bright yellow bus.
Or, you know, kill 0 people, in the normal world.
Edit: only in dumbass america this is a hot take lol
hold on what was the social credit score of the children
None of them have created any shareholder value yet!
This is the normal world.
I have some bad news for you, kid…
It’s not that it’s a hot take it’s just not how things fucking work lol
Yeah, not in the US, that’s for sure. You guys think that the solution to gun violence is to shoot before you get shot.
They didn’t count on a society so absolutely idiotic that they would make trucks practically as high as a school bus deck legal for people to drive without a special licence and express, present purpose.
I don’t know, the bus has a lot more mass than most cars - even in a bumper to bumper collision they should come out pretty well
You’re assuming a perfectly rigid system. The school bus has a lot of mass in front of the rear wheels and under the hood. But behind the rear wheels, it’s basically just aluminum sheeting bolted onto the frame, and children sitting in seats, packed in like sardines. That means the mass at the front of the bus is actually working against you, because you run the risk of sandwiching all of the kids at the back of the bus. If the tail of a school bus crumples, you’ve just shattered 20 kids’ femurs and the fire department is going to spend the next 6 hours cutting them all out of the wreckage. The ideal method is to direct as much energy away from crumpling the frame as possible. And the best way (aside from adding a cow-catcher wedge to the back of the bus, to fling them off to one side or the other) is by turning it into vertical force that lifts the tail, instead of crumpling directly into it.
Hey let’s explore the cowcatcher idea. Could you design it so the texting rear-enders do a sick barrel roll?
How about A giant ramp so they get launched right over the bus like Evel knievel!
A normal car doesn’t have a bumper to bumper collision with a schoolbus. My car would have a bumper-to-headrest collision at that speed.
A bus has a lot of mass in the front, the rest of the bus not so much.
The goal of safety design of vehicles is to dissipate as much energy as possible, at no expense to one or the other side.
This is still a rather mild accident of a pasanger vehicle rear-ending a bus. But it’s made so much worse simply because of both-sided idiotic vehicle designs.
Most of the world realised that and rectified it rather qucikly.
One car getting under another car is never the “safe” solution.
Are you talking about ideal safety design, or American design IRL?
Because weve been in a weight and height arms-race for decades explicitly because whoever weighs more and is higher is safer, at the expense of the other vehicle.
The cars I’m talking about are far from ideal. Ideal cars would look awful, and since, “for some reason”, we’re very touchy about what a car should look like, it’s a shape of an inefficient, unsafe brick.
But yes, the issue is the arms race, as you’ve put it. And it’s starting to infect Europe as well, so education on vehicle safety is paramount.
Vechicle safety is not “as long as I’m in a tank - I’m safe, and that’s all that matters”. (This is not aimed at you)
excuse me the multipla looks more like a mangled duck
Imagine if the bus was smaller.
Imagine if the two kids inside ths bus were seated in back.
Think about how many people are typically on a school bus, compared to a a car which likely has just one occupant.
obvious troll is obvious
The 100% decapitation is a bit outrageous. That isn’t true. Even in rural areas, school buses do not stop in places where there is any risk of a highway speed collision. Which also lowers the risk of death anyone in a smaller car.
And there are reasons beyond them being built on medium duty truck chassis, that in the US school buses sit that high. Part of the idea is, that if the bus gets rear ended, whatever hits you get deflected down and under the bus. This makes an accident much less likely to injure passengers in the back.
You’ve just watched a video of it happening, and you tell me “that doesn’t happen”
I understand the idea, I’m saying it’s a dumbass idea. Might have worked in 1940s when the “school bus” was designed, but it has no place in today’s world.
The whole idea “if I’m in a tank, I’m safe, I don’t care about the cars under me” is the exactly ass-backwards thinking that leads to the ridiculous “trucks” being so popular in the US.
You seem incapable of wanting to think past your nose. And do not want to consider why something is designed the way it is. You just want to be outraged and hate on something and someone. This conversion is at an end.
“Nuh-uh” is not a very good counter-argument.
Did you born fucked or did mama hit you silly?
“Did you born”. Intelligence of an american dumbass car that’s too big owner.
oof, you just couldn’t stick the landing. being unfamiliar with a dialect is no reason to mock it.
from which dialect is “did you born” ?
fuck if i know, i don’t know it either. there are a shitton of dialects tho. How general or specific do you want to get? I’m only an amateur linguist so like, that’s the quality you’re getting here dude
If you don’t know any examples, how will specificity help ?
I mean it sounds like it could be aave but like every city has its own dialect. Like I said, shitton of dialects.
The dialect of where education is illegal. The red bits.
Did your mama orphaned you, when you was littles cause I hearded it from her. :)
She orphaned me with a stick I tell you
Right, can you believe the utter audacity of these uncultured bigots. To insult what they have not yet witnessed for them selves. For shame.
You state it’s a dialect, yet can’t name the dialect?
I’m perfectly ok with mocking someone because of how they write, especially after a comment that is just an ad hominem attack.
I was born, by my mother. She had to bear me. I did not bear. Nor did I born.
of course i can’t name the dialect. most dialects don’t have names. don’t be dense
So how can you state it’s a dialect and not a grammar mistake?
What’s the difference between a dialect and lack of education of English language & grammar?
common usage
Using “your” as “you are” is more common than “Did you born”. I suppose that classifies it at as dialect then.