to not worry about buses with no seatbelts

[BocaDeTrucha]

Ds is 7 months and I'm lucky enough to have my parents looking after him at my house for a few months. They are now ready to start taking him out further afield than walks round the village so want to take him on the bus with them.

They would usually use the car but we live in another European country and the local buses here are coach-style buses with no seatbelts. They would have to put the pushchair under the bus in storage and hold ds on their lap. For some inexplicable reason, I don't have a problem with this but dh really does and doesn't want them to do it. He says they should use the car. They drive every day (on the right) but dm says she 's not comfortable driving over here with ds in the car.

So now we're at a standstill. Dh quite rightly says I'm super concerned about car safety as we're about to buy an erf car seat for ds at way more than a normal car seat would cost but then throw it all out of the window by thinking no seat belt in a bus is ok.... I kind of see his point but still think some people have no choice and have to take their dcs on the bus and it can't be that unsafe.

Any ideas how to solve the impasse??

ive used the bus for years never crashed used the car bump bang crunch

buses are generally safer

Buses are bigger and less likely to have an injuries to the passengers for the sheer fact that they are much higher up than the car can impact. If a bus were hit with a semi, there would be injuries. Everytime I've seen a car/bus crash, it's always the car crumpled up and the bus standing with hardly a scratch. The biggest issue is passengers getting bumped from their seats, but their injuries aren't more than whiplash or a few bruises.

Buses don't have seatbelts in this country either. Does he have a problem with that?

I'm in the UK, and a rural non-driver who has to take my small child on buses, and I do worry about it, to be honest. I never worried in London because the speed was so minimal, but our bus leaves the village and gives straight into an A road with a 50 mph speed limit and huge lorries that dwarf the bus. Having said that, the bus has a wheelchair space, so I keep him in a pushchair put up against the wheelchair backrest, but even then I'm uneasy.

No children at all died in buses last year.

ONS

Perhaps you can use that stat to reassure DH.

One further point is that unless you're absolutely loaded, I'd reconsider the very pricey car seat. 4 out of the 4million children aged 4 or under died as passengers in cars in 2012 (see same table).

In that year, almost no one had an ERF car seat but 99.9999% were ok - the risk you'd be attempting to reduce is literally 1 in a million before you upgrade the car seat.

Car accidents are not that likely to kill any more. As many toddlers die in the bath as in the car (same source).

Thanks for that, Handsoff, Dh loves his hard facts and statistics so this is just what I need to show him!!