By Ryan Gray
Senior Editor

Motorists who speed past school buses with stop arms extended are breaking the law, and several local Departments of Motor Vehicles are taking steps to educate the general public with after-the-fact tickets.

All 50 states have laws making it illegal for motorists to ignore school bus stop arms and red flashing lights on both sides of the undivided highways. However, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that motorists are ignorant of the law, or are just too busy to heed it.

School buses are widely considered the safest mode of transportation in the nation. That is until students disembark. In 2002, the Kansas State Department of Education released a 32-year national study on school bus loading and unloading zones and found that 1,102 students were killed by another vehicle while boarding or during egression.

To help curb these fatalities, several states are targeting motorists who ignore the flashing red lights at school bus stops by utilizing a network of drivers, the Department of Motor Vehicles and law enforcement.

Connecticut Operation Safe Stop began in 1998 as a once-a-year program designed to heighten the awareness of school bus stop arms. Each April, law police and motor vehicle inspectors increased patrols at school bus stops and along routes. However, the program eventually lost steam after only three years of existence, due to a lack of public support, said Robin Leeds of the Connecticut School Transportation Association (COSTA).

"There was so little participation," Leeds said. "The news media got bored with it, the police departments. Many said we've just got better things to do."

In the long run, however, the program has been anything but a failure.

"We don't need that push once a year," Leeds explained. "While the blitz became unsustainable, there was a net gain in terms of awareness and ability to work with local agencies. It fostered a cooperation and relationship between transportation departments and police year round."

Because law enforcement can only be in so many places at once, the program became an out growth of the different ways for school transportation officials to report drive bys. The Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles now handles the day-to-day ticketing of stop arm violators by working closely with transportation departments, bus drivers and local law enforcement authorities.

School bus drivers are trained to document instances of illegal vehicular passings and to forward the reports to the DMV, which in turn enters the license plate number, style of vehicle, color, time and location of the incident into a statewide database. The DMV then matches the data against registration information. For first offenses, a warning letter is sent to the vehicle owner as a notification of the law. If the same vehicle is reported again, a $450 ticket is issued. The next offense is worth $1000, and so on.

Similar programs are in place nationwide, most notably in Arizona , New York and Pennsylvania . In Tennessee , school bus drivers even have the ability to file an arrest warrant for a driver they have identified as violating the stop arm law. Last month, Olympia , Wash. , began a pilot program that warns motorists of the illegal passing law. A posted sign with explicit instructions lights up on the back of a school bus when it prepares to come to a stop. The sign works in conjunction with the extended stop arm. In Toronto , the Ontario government is introducing new legislation that would allow police to charge motorists who ignore stopped school buses in loading zones.

And then there is always the possibility that a police officer catches a motorist in the act.

Studies Support Need for New Technology

One child death is always one too many, yet advocates of the illegal passing laws point to staggering numbers that demonstrate how many close calls occur each day.

A one-day Virginia study conducted in 1996 of 119 school districts found that 3,394 motorists illegally passed a stopped school bus. For a 180-day school year, that would equate to over 600,000 violations. Even more alarming was that 187 of these violations were on the right-side of the bus where students egress.

The same year, the Illinois Department of Transportation's Division of Traffic Safety surveyed 250 school bus drivers over a 41-day period. 135 drivers responded with 3,450 violations. This is estimated to be over 1.9 million violations in one year.

A 1997 survey conducted by the National Survey of Speeding and Other Unsafe Driving Actions, commissioned by NHTSA, actually found that 99 percent of drivers interviewed said the most dangerous unsafe driving behavior was passing a school bus with its lights flashing and stop arm extended, more so than speeding, racing, ignoring stop signs/red lights, crossing railroad tracks with red lights blinking, or passing in a no-passing zone.

A one-day study conducted in 119 of 131 school districts in Virginia (September 1996) found 3,394 motorists illegally passed a stopped school bus. For a 180-day school year, that would be over 600,000 violations. 187 of these violations were on the right-side of the bus where students egress.

In response, the NTHSA published a best practices guide in 2002 to help reduce illegal passings. The main purpose was to motivate and assist transportation departments and local law enforcement agencies in developing programs to reduce stop-arm violations. The guidelines also provide assistance to transportation officials in developing programs to increase public awareness and generate increased cooperation with law enforcement agencies. Additionally, NHTSA is promoting the use of new technology such as bus cameras to aid in curtailing violators.

"We're actually right now in the process of looking into small business grants for implementing automated technology to record illegal passing of school buses," said Susan Kirinich, a NHTSA safety specialist. "It's still to be determined exactly what type of technology is available, and how effective is it? What we don't know is if it is already being used."

There are many products already available to assist law enforcement in prosecuting bus stop violators, such as Bus Vision's video solutions. An external camera pod is discreetly mounted on the side of the bus, just below the lowest rub rail, and is painted yellow for camouflage. Rear- and forward-facing cameras can capture vehicles traveling at relatively high rates of speed, usually around 40 to 50 mph.

"We think this is important because when you're in a vehicle recording, you don't know where the light source is going to be," explained Rob Scott, Bus Vision executive vice president. "On a sunny day, the image could be washed out. We get them coming and going. We have two chances to catch them."

Source: Reprinted from School Transportation News, June, 2004. All rights reserved.