reduced illegal passing by more than 50 percent,” she said of the company’s Child Safety Program. Randazzo offered more evidence that most drivers
ticketed for a stop-arm violation learn their lesson. “His- torically, 98 percent of folks who receive one violation [through the BusPatrol system] never get a second one. We have a transformatively low repeat-offender rate,” he said. BusPatrol deploys artificial intelligence, connected to bus telemetry, in its stop-arm video systems to build a complete evidence package. The program, which has been in use since 2017, has gathered millions of impres- sions of vehicles, people, bicycles, and objects to the point where it, “in our in our latest estimation, is about 11 percent more accurate at detecting an illegal pass than a human being,” Randazzo claimed. “If your camera system misses half the violations, then
you’re not really enforcing law and changing the behav- ior. We’re the only photo enforcement company in this space that uses artificial intelligence for detection,” he claimed. “We provide and recommend full-fleet deploy- ments. If you have 100 buses …it’s easy to put a system on a couple of buses but you’re not going to change behavior all that much and you’re just going to create a revenue stream.”
Meanwhile, Kuchciak said First Light’s preliminary
study results for the fully illuminated stop arm, which can be retrofitted on vehicles in 15 to 20 minutes, are promising. The firm is working with school bus man- ufacturers to make the products a factory option. Two states, North Carolina and South Carolina, have already included it in their specifications. “In the Bath Central Schools in New York, they’ve seen
as much as an actual 84 percent decrease across three buses with the fully illuminated stop arm [installed],” he said. “We also have objective views from drivers say- ing, ‘We noticed cars are stopping further back. We’re not only seeing a decrease in violations, but when we have our illuminated school bus sign on, they’re driving more cautiously around the bus because they know what we are.’” In Iowa, where an extrapolation of 2022 data sug- gests approximately 121,680 illegal passes occur during
NHTSA launched a new media campaign last year to educate the public about the dangers of illegally
passing stopped school buses. Information about the campaign, as well as crash statistics, can be found at
stnonline.com/go/eh.
40 School Transportation News • FEBRUARY 2023
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