Statistical Shenanigans

I, like the next guy, am just as concerned about the well-being of children being loaded on and off school buses. I recently viewed a news story from our local channel 6 that appeared to be talking about routine violations of the state law requiring motorists to stop when a school bus sign was extended with flashing red lights. I immediately visualized b-roll chock full of drivers blowing past stopped buses. Yeah, that makes sense. Come to find out, however, the story was about a school that loads their students into buses on a major road in front of the school while having the bus drivers extend the stop arm. To their surprise, motorists typically dismiss the row of, say 14, school bus flashing school buses and drive through. Maybe I'm the only one who finds it stupid that (1) they load on a major road, and (2) they expect all drivers to halt during the entire loading duration by having all buses extend stop arms (in an already 25mph speed zone!). To defend their decision to behave in this manner, they videotaped violators and had an officer issue citations. Oh, and that's not what annoyed me.

It was when they attempted to bolster this grave safety violation with an inflated statistic that I got annoyed. Let me quote their statistics:
Over seven years, 79 students nationwide were killed when a bus was loading or unloading students. In 38 of those cases, students were killed by passing vehicles.

Anyone else see the failure here? While I'm sure we can all agree that 1 death is far too many, in laymen terms, their statistic translates to an average of 5.4 students being killed by a passing car per year in all 50 states. If you want to play the statistics game, according to this page, approximately 45million students traveled by school bus per year in 2000. That means there is a death rate of 0.0% students per year as a result of loading/unloading fatality by a passing vehicle (0.0000000012% student fatalities/year). You'd have a better chance of being killed by lightning.

So here's what I've learned. Any idiot will try to prove their position by throwing out a number. News stations will run stories on how your kid can be killed completely missing the point that the school's loading process is flawed. Finally, bring your children in during a lightning storm.

UPDATE: It seems someone turned on their "common sense-o-meter". The school has decided to move some loading onto a side street and they are now planning on adding a bus lane on school property. Genius! Find this person, and pay them more.