Analysis of children strollers and prams safety in urban buses

Abstract

The wide incorporation of low floor buses in our cities encourages that child younger than three years, seated on their stroller could use the buses. Currently, the UNECE Regulation No 107 at its revision 5 has included general provisions for the accessibility and basic safety for this type of users. An applied research has been performed to analyze the level of protection offered for the stroller restraint systems included in R107, by performing dynamic tests with instrumented dummies.
More than 20 dynamic sled tests were performed to assess the child safety in urban buses. Two types of configurations have been tested: a vehicle specific CRS for urban buses and the own stroller with different restraint systems.
The specific vehicle built-in CRS tested is a rearward facing group 0/I that is currently in use in the city of Madrid (Spain) by the public urban buses. This CRS was tested in frontal and rear impact with the acceleration pulse defined in the UNECE regulation No 80.
On the other hand, to make suggestions for using the stroller in urban buses, a very low severity crash pulse (up to 2 g peak acceleration and AV = 20 km/h) was defined and used in this study. Four stroller models with three types of restraint devices (safety belt, PRM wheelchair backrest and a folding backrest device) were tested with this pulse. The strollers were selected in order to reduce biasing of the results.
Several dummies (P3, Q3 and Q1) were used to evaluate the injuries and the kinematics. Furthermore, different sources of IRAV have been applied for the Q dummies (R94 and FMVSS 208 scaled by applying Mertz 2003 techniques), an extended range of injury criteria is obtained and an in depth analysis of the protection offered by the different restraints systems used is performed.