THOUGHT LEADER
Intersection of Autonomous Vehicles and School Buses Written By Jim Harris
I
t’s alarming: A staggering 8,000 drivers illegally passed a stopped school bus, with the stop arm de- ployed and red lights flashing between mid-August and Feb. 10 in Austin, Texas alone.
The Austin Independent School District (AISD) part- ners with BusPatrol to install cameras on every bus in the district. When a car illegally passes a stopped school bus with the red flashing lights and stop arm deployed, police issue a $300 citation after confirming a violation on video provided by BusPatrol. Every school district should be capturing the license plate of offenders. BusPatrol system has no up-front cost for a school district because they fund the program out of the revenue from fines. The City of Austin passed an ordinance in 2015 allow- ing the school district to implement the program. The fine is an effective deterrent because only 1 percent of drivers who are issued a ticket re-offend. Since mid-August, 25 Waymo driverless taxis have blown by stopped school buses illegally.
Three Ways to Look at These Statistics 1. Waymo’s 25 violation are small in comparison 2. There are 2.1 million vehicles in the greater Aus- tin area and just over 100 Waymo autonomous vehicles. One out of every 263 normal vehicles illegally drove by a stopped school bus but one in four Waymo vehicles did. On a per vehicle basis, Waymo has 65 times more illegal drive-bys than average motorists.
3. Human drivers have a 1 percent repeat rate. Way- mo AVs repeated the mistake 24 times in the last seven months. School buses are designed to have the highest visi-
bility possible. They’re painted bright yellow. They have flashing red lights when stopped and an arm that comes out into traffic. Alarmed about these incidents, Kris Hafezizadeh,
Austin ISD’s director of transportation, got in touch with Waymo and offered to run tests in a safe parking lot in early December so that Waymo engineers could solve this problem. Waymo updated its software a couple of weeks later as a result, but violations still have occurred since the updates. Hafezizadeh and Austin police suggested to Way-
mo representatives, that until the problem is resolved, Waymo not drive during the hours that school buses are picking up and dropping off students. Waymo represen- tatives refused and said that the cars will keep driving. The video documentation of these violations is an im-
50 School Transportation News • MARCH 2026
portant part of this story because without this evidence, Austin ISD would not know the extent of the threat that children face and the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Adminis- tration would not have had the data that prompted their investigations. A Waymo spokesperson is quoted by Reuters as say- ing, “Our safety performance around school buses is superior to human drivers” But it depends on how you look at the numbers. In an interview with Bloomberg on Feb. 11, Waymo Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana would not unequivocally confirm the problem has been solved.
Frightening Figure: National Epidemic Every year, the National Association of State Directors
of Pupil Transportation Services (NASDPTS) conducts a voluntary, one-day study to document how many cars illegally pass stopped school buses. Last year, bus drivers in 36 states and D.C. participated. The data was annual- ized and extrapolated to cover all U.S. jurisdictions. The figure is frightening: 43.5 million illegal passes a year. A NTHSA study as to why this is happening is equally disturbing: Over 30 percent didn’t care, 25 percent were in a hurry, 24 percent said they didn’t know the law, and 12 percent were distracted A staggering 94 percent of car crashes are due to driv-
er error. As a result, 44,000 people are killed every year in car accidents in the U.S. and another 2.6 million end up in the hospital. So, the long-term promise of driver- less vehicles is great. No more drunk driving, no more distracted driving accidents. However, currently there is a big, yawing gap between the promise and the practice.
Why Is This Important Now? This is important right now because there is a rapid expansion of driverless cars in certain jurisdictions. In July, Waymo reported that it had completed 100
million fully autonomous rides and 250,000 paid rides per week. We are in an era of rapid expansion of driver- less vehicles. This makes it critical to fix this problem as soon as possible. Waymo operates in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoe-
nix, Austin, Atlanta and Miami and plans to expand into Washington, Detroit, Las Vegas, San Diego, Denver and nine other U.S. and international cities this year. The service will hit more than 1 million paid robotaxi rides a week in the U.S. by the end of 2026, up from the current 400,000 paid rides a week, according to Mawakana.
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