School bus permits to lapse after 3 years

The city's education commission has required all school bus operating permits to be renewed every three years, local media reported Tuesday.

The requirement aims to ensure that all of the 1,954 school buses in the city are fit to transport students, as it specifies how long a school bus can operate before undergoing the inspection required to renew the permit.

Education officials disclosed the new requirement at a working conference for the Shanghai Youth Protection Office, a body under the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, according to a report in the Shanghai Evening Post.

The education commission implemented new regulations last August that required all school buses in the city to obtain operating permits. Under the School Bus Safety Management Regulation, the buses have to pass a safety inspection to obtain a permit. Bus owners also have to prove they have insurance and their drivers are licensed.

All of the 1,954 school buses in the city have since acquired the operating permit, accounting for 67 percent of the total number of permits issued nationally, the report said.

Starting from September, every school bus operating in the city will also have to install special signs and lights.

"It is good that the school bus operating permits need to be renewed regularly, but it is more important to improve how the vehicles are managed," said Zeng Yanbo, a researcher at the Institute of Youth and Juvenile Studies of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Several past bus-related accidents occurred because the buses were overloaded, not because of mechanical problems, Zeng said. Some schools resorted to overloading the buses to save money.

"Traffic police might not discover an overloaded bus because the children are small and the buses are difficult to spot when there are a lot of vehicles on the road. The key to preventing more tragedies is to improve management at the schools and kindergartens," Zeng told the Global Times.

The problem is especially prevalent at the private schools and kindergartens for migrant workers in the suburbs, where the economic conditions are not as good as those in urban areas, she said.