The General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) has launched this Monday and until next Friday, May 26, a new special campaign to monitor and control the safety of school transport vehicles, which in Cantabria use more than 15,500 students.
Every day, more than 600,000 schoolchildren throughout Spain use this type of transport to travel to their educational centers and, although accident rates are minimal demonstrating that this is a safe sector, it is necessary to continue to guarantee that safety.
Therefore, both the agents of the Traffic Group of the Civil Guard, and the local police of those municipalities that decide to join the campaign, will intensify inspections on these vehicles this week, checking that the authorizations and documents they must have are correct for the provision of the service.
In addition, the agents will verify that the technical conditions and safety elements of the vehicle are those required by the regulations, as well as the special requirements to be met by the driver himself.
School transport is subject to a series of rules whose compliance in many cases depends on the safety of its small passengers, so it is everyone’s responsibility to demand that these be complied with, whether through campaigns such as this one, schools or parents’ associations that are responsible for hiring the routes.
Among other things, since 20 October 2007, buses that are registered must be fitted with restraint systems as the safety belt is useful on any route, be it short or long, urban or interurban and, since 2013, all vehicles must also have an emergency braking system that is activated automatically when it detects the possibility of a collision.
Inadequate speed and distractions are the main causes of accidents in which this type of vehicle is involved, so it will be especially controlled that it is driven at the allowed speed and that no use is made of the mobile phone or other devices that suppose distraction. Alcohol and other drug checks will also be conducted among drivers.
In addition, due to the aforementioned importance of the safety belt in case of an accident, special attention will be paid to the use of these in those school buses that have them installed.
In the case of Cantabria, up to 180 agents of the Traffic Sector of the Civil Guard will participate in this campaign. And, as is usual in this type of campaigns, municipalities have also been invited to join it, so that the monitoring of this type of transport is carried out both in urban and interurban areas. In Cantabria, all those municipalities that have Local Police have been invited to participate.
In the case of our Autonomous Community, 15,566 students use one of the 510 routes established this course daily, in which they develop their service up to 575 vehicles.
At the end of last December, a similar campaign was carried out in Cantabria with the aim of raising awareness among families, drivers and the entire educational community about the importance of compliance with the rules in this important sector.
On that occasion, 168 vehicles were checked, and 32 complaints were filed, many of them for administrative offences: lack of compulsory insurance or circulation with expired ITV. It should be noted that there were no reports of alcohol and drug offences.