IC Bus prevented the crash of a bus being delivered to Cullman County Schools in Alabama. The driver later marveled at how the vehicle “took over” driving and averted a crash. With two decades of experience in the automotive
industry, Leslie Kilgore is also very familiar with ADAS. Now, as the vice president of engineering for Thomas Built Buses, she said she is glad to see the technology catching on in school buses. Thomas Buses has offered electronic stability control (ESC) and ADAS for about five years and “we’re adding more every year,” Kilgore added. The entire BusWise suite for Thomas Buses’ flagship
Saf-T-Liner C2 includes Mobileye warning systems de- signed to help drivers avoid front-end collisions, hitting pedestrians and lane departures, as well as a multi-cam- era system that provides a 360-degree view around the vehicle and the Meritor WABCO ESC. Kilgore stressed that there are a wide range of options, including the spectrum of passive to active ADAS measures, as differ- ent districts can have very different needs. “Choice is really important in the school bus industry,
everybody’s situation is different,” she shared. “Some are on top of everything we have that is safety related. Oth- ers, maybe in rural areas [or] depending on what their situation is, may or may not choose it. Some [bus] drivers in urban situations that have to deal with congestion on surface streets, they have the everyday driver they have to deal with. These systems really give that [school bus] driver an opportunity to be helped—that little extra if you’re wavering across the line with the lane departure warning, or you’re going a little above the speed limit, or you’re going a little too fast for the car in front of you.”
Some districts might be more reluctant to adopt active
mitigation systems that act autonomously—“taking con- trol” from the driver in emergency situations. “There are systems that progressively warn the driver
without intervention, for example an audio or visual warn- ing, a buzz in the seat, sometimes getting the steering wheel to vibrate, but it doesn’t take over and correct,” Kil- gore explained, adding other systems start more passively and become active. “The braking system is progressive. It will alert the driver, if the driver doesn’t react in a way that they slow the bus down, then it will intervene.” Kilgore said that there can be an adjustment period for
bus drivers, more so than in passenger cars given the weight and size differences. “But once they get the hang of it, they love it,” she added. Some transportation supervisors said they don’t see
ADAS as crucial, given their drivers’ skills, experience and track record. But they said warning systems remain a valuable and additional safeguard to have. “It only works if there is a driver that is not nec-
essarily driving correctly or is too close to another vehicle,” said Ann Rugg, transportation supervisor for the Springville-Griffith Institute Central School District in New York state, which has seven new buses with standard ADAS features from IC Bus. “Anything that would enhance student safety is something we would look at and consider. But I don’t know that I would pay more for it, necessarily.” Katrina Falk, director of transportation for Shelby Eastern Schools Corporation in Indiana, has a new Thomas bus with ADAS. She likewise said the district “didn’t necessarily look at [ADAS] when it first came out—you don’t want to be the guinea pig for new technology. But anything that enhances
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