Crash and safety assessment program for paratransit buses

This paper describes an assessment program for paratransit buses concerning their crashworthiness and safety of passengers. The program developed by the authors was approved by the Transit Office of the Florida Department of Transportation as a part of the Florida Vehicle Procurement Program (FVPP) in August 2007. Several valuable, worldwide vehicle safety standards were adopted in it with modifications addressing the bus construction process and relevance of particular structural components in crash events. Passenger compartment structure, which needs to be protected against the most dangerous accidents such as a side impact and a rollover, is a major area of concern in the standard. Lack of such standards may result in poor crashworthiness characteristics of the bus structure and in severe injuries and possible passenger fatalities. Either full-scale experiments or numerical standardized simulations were proposed as equivalent approval methods for paratransit buses. Selected results for partially validated Finite Element (FE) models and the nonlinear explicit dynamic code LS-DYNA were used to demonstrate a numerical approach for a bus structure approval. The FE models can also be used to assist the bus manufacturer in an effort to improve the crashworthiness of the new bus designs. The procedure described in this paper was implemented to monitor crashworthiness resistance of the paratransit buses distributed and operated in the state of Florida.