Grew up in US public schools in the 90’s. I’m pretty sure a lot of my buses did, in fact, have them. They were tucked down into the seats. Sometimes a kid messing around would pull them out but no one ever used them or was told to use them…. except one time.

One time on my rowdy bus, a school secretary read out the rules to follow on the bus and mentioned seat belts. The bus driver corrected her and said we don’t do that. I’m not sure what the intentions were there. A quick Google search tells me some states require them!

If some places your show is airing require a piece of safety equipment for something happening on screen and some don’t, it’s better to show it. Better to make them look overly cautious to some kids than reckless to others!

Here in Singapore, some private charter buses have seat belts fitted to every seat; certain types of buses, such as van-sized microbuses and those intended for use as school buses, are required to have them by law. On some newer public buses, certain seats (usually the seat directly facing the aisle in the last row) will have a seat belt as well.

@Whirly Twirly  
with the frizz? NO WAY!!

@Ferrotter  
I knew that much. It was the part about the bus that surprised me.

Full sized American/Canadian school buses have never had any kind of passenger restraints, primarily because it would be difficult to get a bus full of kids to use them in the first place, and if the bus driver were incapacitated in a crash there would be no adult to make sure the kids got out of the belts before the bus sank or was consumed by flames or whatever. Ideally such buses have heavily padded seats and backs, so the sheer inertia of such a large vehicle– combined with the rubbery nature of bouncing children with flexible bones– is usually enough to prevent the kind of deceleration injuries which result from smaller vehicles getting tossed around by impact.
 
@Background Pony #FF4A  
I heard that shoulder belts that lack lap belts are actually pretty unsafe  
They’re enormously unsafe, since all that means is you’ll get wadded up like a wet paper towel under the dashboard in a frontal collision and have everything below your ribcage bent in several incorrect directions if hit from any other angle. The automatic shoulder belts common in American cars from the early ’90s only ever existed because the rising ubiquity of airbags in that decade prompted many states to adopt “passive restraint system” laws to protect drivers who were too gaspingly stupid to use seatbelts, and shitty automatic seatbelts were used by many manufacturers to meet the technical requirements of such laws in the cheapest and easiest-to-retrofit way possible.

@15InchBic  
It’s been an insult for as long as people in special education classes have been driven to school in a special bus. And most of the intelligence-related insults we have today were just older terms for the same thing before it was called “special ed.” Retard, cretin, moron, imbecile, idiot, and probably others, were once clinical terms for a substantially subnormal IQ; “cretinism” was also a clinical term for a subnormal IQ and deformities caused by underactive thyroid, separate from being a “cretin.” The clinical terms get replaced every so often because they rapidly become insults. But it’s pointless. As soon as the new clinical term is discovered by the general public, it will immediately become an insult too. (Cretin, in particular, was a word created for the expressed purpose of reminding people that the cretin was a human being too, beloved by God as it derives from “Christian,” and deserved to be treated as such. That positive connotation lasted about as long as a mayfly.) Decent people won’t call an actual retard that to his/her face. But thinking that any word which connotes low intelligence isn’t automatically going to be used as an insult is, if not retarded per se, then idiotic, moronic, imbecilic, and cretinous. Because implying someone’s opinions or actions you object to result from low intelligence is about as obvious a go-to insult as it is possible to imagine.

@Background Pony #FF4A  
Really? Well, those people should have their legs broken.  
Scumbags.

@15InchBic  
“Short buses” are for the special education students & people have made needing special education an insult for some reason.

@Background Human  
Does it? News to me. Then again it’s been nearly 30 years since I set foot in a classroom, so I’m a bit out of the loop.

If Granny Smith stops all of a sudden rainbow and pinkie are going to lose a lot of teeth because of that handle bar.

Yeah. Can’t imagine why. Not as if safety matters on one of these things.

@15InchBic  
It’s a shuttle. “Short bus” has… connotations.

Look closer. There’s only three seats per row. They’re on a shortbus, which is easier to drive as well as more cost effective because they don’t use as much gas, and if the kids get rowdy it’s far and away easier for the bus driver to quell the situation.
 
However, because they aren’t nearly as big the people riding said bus are more prone to whiplash among other things, so seat belts are required. 20-something years ago (around the time the artists and writers of this show were actually in school) they were only lap-belts, but modern shortbuses require lap AND shoulder belts.

@Background Pony #FF4A  
Looks like you’re right. Either one by itself is a bad idea. More restraints = better. The safest configuration is a five-point harness, like they use in NASCAR and baby seats.
 

@Background Human  
I heard that shoulder belts that lack lap belts are actually pretty unsafe.

In the United States, most school buses, including many new ones, do not have seat belts mainly for cost, convenience, and the fact that statistics show that they aren’t worth it in many cases. As a matter of fact, you are statistically more likely to get killed while directly outside the bus than when you are inside it, even without seatbelts. School buses are just so large that in most collisions, inertia prevents the bus from accelerating or decelerating fast enough that seatbelts would be needed. In addition, many districts don’t have enough funding to buy new buses or retrofit old ones with seatbelts.
 
Even if every school but had seatbelts, most people probably wouldn’t use them. Think about it, when you give a single adult the job of getting several little children from several stops throughout a city to a school in about 30 minutes, they won’t have the time or mental capacity to ensure every child puts on their seatbelt and then keeps that seatbelt on while they are driving. There’s also the consideration of age differences. A school bus owned by a K-12 district may be used for kindergarteners on one route and then used for high school seniors on another. The seatbelts might not fit properly on some students which could cause more harm than good in a strong impact. Also, many routes may require three students to a seat while most buses only offer two seatbelts a seat.
 
However, current law states that in buses under 10,000 pounds (like the one in this short may certainly be), lap and shoulder belts are required because of their smaller size. Only certain municipalities require seat belts on all buses. If this seems very long and detailed for a comment on a photo of a fictional school bus in a fictional world, I know.

Lap belts are bullshit. If they do crash, everyone but Granny Smith is hosed.

@Mildgyth  

A good number of city buses don’t. It’s actually an interesting aspect of their design that the combination of a bus’s height, mass, (relatively) low speeds and compartmentalized padding make seat belts largely superfluous. They’ve done studies even that indicate installing seat belts mostly just adds to cost, with no corresponding increase in passenger safety.

I’ve always thought it’s strange how people get hysterical about protecting children from everything, but they will sign off on transporting their children everyday in a vehicle which has the seat cushion as its main safety feature.

@QueenChrysalisIsBestVillain  
Same. The buses at my school never had seat belts.

Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever ridden a bus that had seat belts, ever.

@Princess Trixie vi Equestria
 
I guess that must be valid for intermunicipal-interstate buses; i think i remember these having it, but city buses in my town don’t have any aside of the driver’s and the wheelchairbound seats.

What’s the point here? I don’t get it… in my country all buses are required by law to have seat belts, I had no idea it was different elsewhere… I suppose caring about security is not the same across the globe?

@Animanga21  
STOP THE BUS!