School bus cameras: Safety feature or cash grab?
The fine for passing a stopped school bus in Florida starts at $165 and only goes up from there, yet it happens every day.
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According to a study by the University of South Florida, “approximately one out of every three school buses in operation during the single day of illegal pass data collection was passed by a private motorist adds up to nearly 1.9 million illegal passes occurring in a typical school year in Florida.” With the study adding, “yet, law enforcement agencies throughout the state issued a yearly average of only about 2,700 citations for illegally passing stopped school buses during the past five years.”
To deal with this issue, Florida has authorized schools to install cameras on buses, like red light cameras, which will catch and ticket drivers who pass the buses while they are stopped and loading or unloading students.
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“Well, we did 752 in one day, and that was up from 458 the year prior, which means to us, Florida’s growing,” says Arby Creach the Transportation Director at Osceola County Schools. “That’s the ones we see, right? The system is all automatic. It will get things that the driver won’t see. Because when the stop arms are out, the reds are running, the cameras are active.”
Osceola has been in the middle of a pilot program to test out the cameras. Pictures were taken, but so far, no tickets have been issued.
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For Osceola, the concern is over ownership of the camera system. The school wants the cameras there for safety, not profit generation.
“It is wrong, in my mind, to pay 80% of taxpayer revenue dollars to another company who doesn’t have your best interests at heart, who has a revenue generation business model only they will tout safety, but at the end, when they aren’t making the amount of money they need to make, they will leave you, period, over and out,” says Creach. “So, we’re going to buy cameras from a company that we’re testing, and we will do everything in-house. We will never leave ourselves if the revenue goes down, we own the cameras.”
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The Osceola plan to buy its own cameras and have the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office review citations rather than using an outside vendor could help prevent what schools in other parts of the county have experienced with tickets issued for non-infractions and disputes over excessive ticketing.
“That’s clearly a perverse incentive to put in these systems and ticket as many people as possible,” says Jay Beeber of the National Motorists Association.
Beeber analyzed data from school bus ticketing systems across the county, providing testimony to the Pennsylvania State Senate last September raising concerns about the applications of the cameras and the chance for misuse if profit is the driving factor.
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