School bus stop arm pilot reveals extent of violations

A school bus stop arm pilot programme undertaken in Volusia County in Florida has revealed the level of drivers illegally passing stopped school buses when the stop arm is extended and children are boarding or disembarking. During a 29 day pilot period, cameras on just one of the county's 229 buses captured a total of 71 violations. The pilot results also showed that eight out of every 10 violations occurred between 1:00pm and 3:00pm with 67 per cent of the violations occurring on either Tuesday or Wednesda
June 5, 2012 Read time: 2 mins

A school bus stop arm pilot programme undertaken in Volusia County in Florida has revealed the level of drivers illegally passing stopped school buses when the stop arm is extended and children are boarding or disembarking. During a 29 day pilot period, cameras on just one of the county's 229 buses captured a total of 71 violations. The pilot results also showed that eight out of every 10 violations occurred between 1:00pm and 3:00pm with 67 per cent of the violations occurring on either Tuesday or Wednesday of each week. Under the pilot agreement, events were captured, but drivers were not prosecuted.

"Our goal was to measure how many drivers disregard stopped school buses with the stop arm extended and illegally pass them," said Greg Akin, director of transportation for Volusia County School District." Keeping our children safe is our number one priority and we want to change driver behavior in a positive way to protect the lives of the children who ride a school bus to and from school every day."

17 American Traffic Solutions provided Volusia County School District with its CrossingGuard camera technology to help monitor the extent of the problem. Designed to monitor and enforce traffic around a stopped school bus, CrossingGuard is powered by 5876 AngelTrax's IntelliGuard cameras mounted on the driver's side of the school bus. When the school bus extends its stop arm, the system automatically detects if a vehicle passes the stopped school bus within the enforced zone.  High-quality violation images of a vehicle's license plate and a video that captures the entire violation event provide law enforcement the evidence they need to effectively prosecute these violations.

The Volusia School District is one of six statewide participating in this pilot programme.

Enforcement

Related Content

  • March 15, 2012
    Enforcement suppliers highlight industry best practice
    Major suppliers of enforcement technology highlight the countries, regions or cities that they consider to be leading the way in reduction of road traffic violations. The French government’s ambitious programme of enforcing traffic law violations has proven to be an unrivalled success and is continuing to bring improvements in road safety with innovative enforcement technology.
    Read More
  • October 30, 2015
    Caltrans trials Xerox’s Passenger Detection System
    Xerox’s Passenger Detection System has been trialled in California and compared with the state’s team of human counters giving some interesting results, as Colin Sowman discovers. Like others adopting high-occupancy and high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes for congestion management, Caltrans has faced challenges with compliance in what has been effectively an ‘honour system’ with drivers trusted to set their tags correctly or comply with the multi-passenger requirement.
    Read More
  • July 27, 2012
    Give offending drivers credit for good behaviour
    Andrew Rooke and Dave Marples of Technolution B.V. take a look at what can be done to address a long-standing problem: the all-or-nothing approach of automated enforcement. To start, a brief history of speeding: on 14 November 1896, the first Veteran Car Run was staged in England from London to Brighton. It was organised to celebrate new British legislation to raise the maximum speed of vehicles from four to 14mph while also removing the need for a person waving a red flag to walk in front of the car and wa
    Read More
  • July 31, 2012
    Developing an integrated WIM/ANPR enforcement system
    The weigh in motion market remains especially buoyant and technological development continues to reflect this. Although there are major differences in operating philosophies, particularly between developed and developing countries, both the numbers of countries using Weigh In Motion (WIM) technology and the numbers of systems that they deploy are on the increase.
    Read More

Highlighted Content