PHOENIX (AP) -- When a bus bound for Phoenix careened off a Utah road last week, none of the 51 passengers was wearing a seat belt. Nine of them died.

Passengers in a bus that overturned in Texas earlier this month weren't wearing seat belts, killing one and injuring dozens. And passengers weren't wearing seat belts when a bus sped down a North Carolina embankment or when a bus hit a concrete wall in Florida. Eighty two people were injured in those crashes.

While buses typically provide one of the safest modes of transportation, those four accidents in the first six days of 2008 underscore a lack of safety standards when it comes to buses operating throughout the United States.

Tour buses, motor coaches, commuter and school buses throughout the country don't have safety belts, and that's because no law exists requiring companies to install them.

"As far as I know, there is not a single motor coach in the United States that has seat belts," said Stephen Kirchner, president of the National Motorcoach Network, a national bus network and charter service. "If the government mandated we had to have seat belts, then we would have seat belts."

Federal safety officials have been calling for the adoption of stringent standards for motor coaches for nearly a decade that could include seat belts, shatterproof windows and reinforced roof construction.

At issue are rollover accidents in which windows of motor coaches blow out, roofs peel back and passengers are tossed out. Survivors of the Utah crash describe just that scene.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the Jan. 6 crash, lists protection for motor-coach passengers on its "10 Most Wanted" list of safety measures.

It has been on the list since 1999, when the agency determined that one of the primary causes of injuries was a result of passengers being thrown out of their seats. But little has been done.

"We would like to see changes," said NTSB biomechanical engineer Kristin Poland, adding that her agency doesn't make regulations. "The only thing we can do is issue recommendations."

Poland said because motor coaches in the United States are not standardized, the number of seats, the space between seats, window size, roof strength and passenger restraints vary from bus to bus. Only the driver is required to wear a seat belt.

Meanwhile, motor coaches that operate in Europe, Australia and other nations are required to have seat belts and safety glass. They also must use seats able to withstand a specific impact and have reinforced roofs.

She said federal agencies haven't moved to improve bus standards mainly because of the low number of serious bus accidents. There are 20 to 25 motor-coach deaths per year compared with 41,000 auto deaths.

Bus companies say that an argument for seat belts can't even be made because proper testing hasn't been done.

"We may get conclusive evidence that there is not an added benefit from safety belts," ABA vice president Eron Shosteck said. "We need to do the research first."

He said bus companies aren't conducting any independent tests similar to those conducted and paid for by the automobile industry. Instead, they're waiting for the government to do it.

"We don't have the resources to do that," Shosteck said. "Our industry is small when compared to the auto industry."

Georgia lawyer Ken Shigley, who represents survivors of a tour bus crash in Atlanta last year that killed six and injured 29 members of an Ohio university baseball team, said if seat belts and safety glass had been installed in the bus, the outcome would have been significantly different.

As it stands now, Shigley said, accidents keep happening, and the bus industry keeps blaming the government for failing to enact standards. "If they (bus industry) embraced it and helped it happen, it would happen," he said.

Last month a jury in Texas came to a similar conclusion, ordering a bus company to pay $17.5 million to the families of victims in a charter-bus crash that killed seven and injured dozens in 2003.

The jury said the bus company should have installed seat belts and concluded that operating the bus without them created an unreasonable danger.

Investigators have yet to determine if seat belts and other recommended reinforcements would have made a difference in the Utah crash.

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Information from: The Arizona Republic, http://www.azcentral.com

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