Roof Crush Resistance and Rollover Strength of a Paratransit Bus

Paratransit buses constitute a special group of vehicles in the US due to their smaller size, two-step assembly process, and their use for complementary services to the regular scheduled transit routes. Due to their uniqueness these buses lack national crashworthiness standards specifically dedicated to the paratransit fleet. Several states in the US adopted the quasi-static symmetric roof loading procedure according to the standard FMVSS 220 for testing the integrity of the paratransit buses. However, as many researchers point out, the dynamic rollover test according to UN-ECE Regulation 66 (ECE-R66), which was approved by more than forty countries in the world, (excluding the US), may provide more realistic assessment of the bus strength.