student safety, we’re all for that.” Meanwhile, Brette
Fraley, executive director of transpor- tation for Kanawha County Schools in Charleston, West Virginia, said his operation recent- ly purchased two buses with collision mitigation, and his buses have had electronic stability control and auto- mated disc brakes for some time. “The first response
22%of respondents have recently ordered new school buses equipped with advanced driver assistance systems. (Out of 288 responses.)
14%are already operating school buses equipped with advanced driver assistance systems in their fleet. (Out of 279 responses.)
of our drivers and trainers starting to use them is that they like it,” Fraley commented. “If I go left of center, I get a notification. If I’m speeding, if I’m ap- proaching another car too quickly, I get a notification. It just helps awareness. There are so many distractions for a bus driver. It’s a lot to expect out of a person to handle a commercial motor vehicle with 64 heads popping behind you, watching the road, watching the mirror. All the help we can get, we want.” Lorri Smith, transportation director of East Valley School District in Spokane, Washington, said her drivers are getting ADAS features as standard on the two to three new buses purchased each year from IC Bus. “When we are training, we still train as though [ADAS features are] not there because we don’t want them to become dependent on it and relax a little because they have this buffer,” she said.
15%Yes
7% No (According to 46 readers who have ADAS installed on school buses.)
The Bendix ESP electronic stability control system has been standard equipment on all Blue Bird buses since January 2019, and the company has been offering it for about six years, explained John Barrington, the OEM’s director of product planning. A backup camera system is also standard, and Blue
34 School Transportation News • SEPTEMBER 2020
Has the technology helped to avoid a crash?
78%We have had no instance where the technology was put to work
Bird offers oth- er ADAS features such as blind-spot monitoring, vehicle detection and lane departure warnings. Plus, the company said it is continually developing both active and passive features.
Barrington said he thinks ADAS features will in- creasingly become the norm on school buses, just as they have been for pas- senger vehicles. He noted that anti-lock brakes are an ADAS technology that most people take for granted. “We’ve seen
steady growth of adoption, that’s typical of our in- dustry,” Barrington observed. The fact that district budgets are often cash- strapped and in flux, and new buses are often purchased in
small numbers, means that “with these things we have always grown steadily rather than an overnight adoption,” he added. Integrating ADAS technology with other automated
alarms, notifications and signals on a school bus makes it more complicated than implementing ADAS in a car, Barrington noted. “Historically, this is the natural progression. Usually these systems are introduced in high-end automotive then mainstream automotive then commercial vehicles,” he added. Introducing ADAS features to electric school buses raises
some extra challenges, said Marc-André Pagé, vice pres- ident of operations for the Lion Electric Company. This has caused delay in implementation. But “Lion is currently working with the ADAS industry leaders to start imple- menting ADAS systems within our school products,” he added, including technology from Bendix and WABCO.
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