| บทคัดย่อ (อังกฤษ) |
At present, education is comprehensively accentuated in improving learning skills of students by centering on field trips to enhance their interests in learning surrounding experiences and applying them in daily living. In taking students out of school for
educational journey, most of schools popularly use bus services; hence risk of accidents cannot be avoided.
Development of safety standards for sightseeing school bus is one of processes in providing safety standard requirements. As well, service users have been introduced to the approach and understanding for bus entrepreneur selection on the basis of safety that must be considered before comfort-related factors and operation costs. Thus, this effort would motivate the entrepreneurs to substantially improve bus service quality and
maintenance as well as readiness of drivers. Simultaneously, it also greatly enhances safety standards of field trips for students, their parents and teachers.
Therefore, introduction of bus safety standards of field trips for the pilot project in Nakhon Ratchasima area is considerably developed, which aims to: (1) review safety standards of sightseeing school bus of domestic and international organizations/units as well as monitoring systems in order to comply with the required standards; (2) study safety situations of the use of sightseeing school bus of educational institutions; (3)
develop safety standards of sightseeing school bus and guidelines for educational institutions in a practical manner.
According to the study, it was interestingly found that, considering safety standard requirements of field trips of related domestic bodies such as Ministry of
Education which has issued the Ministry of Education’s Regulations in taking school and university students for educational tour B.E. 2548, the Regulation has dictated head of
educational institutions in taking responsibility for selecting safe vehicles and knowledgeable and skill drivers. Such requirements do not provide the substantial details related to the selection assessment of vehicles and drivers. Together with the brainstorming session, the stakeholders mutually agreed that government allocated inadequate budgets to educational institutions in enabling the provision of bus service quality for student activity arrangements.
Based on the review of safety standards of bus services in other countries, the findings depicted that any operations regulations are very slightly different from Thailand e.g., regulations on vehicle size, design standards (use of safety belt and strong vision mirrors) and inspection, etc. It is only that Thailand must have audit to ensure a rigorous compliance with the requirements. The significant issue -which should be adopted by Thailand – involves giving priority to the selection of knowledgeable and skill drivers as well as training in necessary topics; for example, 120-hour driver training course in US. In Thailand, the major causes of accidents are quite similar to US in that they typically occurred due to drivers. Albeit, the severity of crashes in Thailand might be different since materials used for vehicle body are not strong enough to reach the standards.
Regarding the study of the Road Safety Fund, it illustrated that vehicle building by garages in Thailand does not meet the standards compared to other countries, so some effective measures must be provided to support such requirements. In addition, factors affecting the selection of the use of sightseeing school bus comprise 5 aspects including price, comfort, service quality, safety, and driver factors associated with stakeholders (e.g., school board committees, teachers, staffs, students, and parents).The results demonstrated that safety should be considered as the first priority factor of selection of sightseeing school bus with 47-69% of agreed responses that exemplify the travel expectation with safety concerns. However, a significant
number of sample groups of about 8-29% consider price factor as a top priority, so they
preferably use cheap vehicles that may pose an increased risk of accident. Henceforth, related authorities should provide some potential measures or policies to divert attitudes of such group to build a greater awareness of safe travel.
Selection of Sightseeing School Bus Manual based on the case study of Nakhon
Ratchasima Province was developed by our research team with using survey data to develop criteria/check list. The Manual consists of 4 parts including (1) introduction of the use of sightseeing school bus; (2) procedures for selecting safe sightseeing schoolbus; (3) check list; and (4) related documents.
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