Philly school buses will test out pilot to catch cars illegally passing them

The School District of Philadelphia doesn’t know how many drivers ignore its buses’ stop arms when students get on or off.

“There have been a couple of situations this school year where students have been injured by motorists,” said Teresa Fleming, the district’s chief operating officer.

She could not say how many children had been affected or if it was directly related to drivers ignoring the stop arm.

Still, Fleming said, the district wants to “make sure that when students are entering the bus, they’re as safe as possible.”

In an initiative that started Tuesday, 20 of the district’s yellow buses are being equipped with artificial intelligence-backed cameras that aim to catch reckless drivers. It is part of a pilot program that will run until the end of the school year in mid-June.

Fleming said a large focus of the pilot is figuring out how many drivers are flouting the state’s school bus stopping law, which requires motorists to stop 10 feet from a bus when the stop arm is out and its red lights are flashing — it’s 25 feet in New Jersey.

For the pilot, the district has partnered with BusPatrol, an industry leader in the technology since 2017, and Gatekeeper Systems, which already provides the district with internal school bus cameras, free.

The pilot period is also to determine which city agencies would issue the eventual citations should the district decide to go forward with the program.

Gatekeeper and BusPatrol operate in mostly the same way. The minute the stop arm pops out, the bus’ cameras are activated. A license plate reader captures the necessary driver information while the AI cameras capture video of the illegal pass.

Gatekeeper, for example, angles the camera so it has a clear view of the stop arm and the driver, said Jason Harris, vice president of the company’s Student Protection Programs.

The companies then package the evidence collected in real time and pass it along to the designated partner, which would then issue the citation. Drivers could pay the fine or fight it.

The advantage of using AI, Harris said, is that it drastically reduces false positives, distinguishing cyclists and pedestrians from cars.

The technology is relatively new but spreading across the country, as National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation survey data suggest illegal passes of school buses are on the rise.

According to the association’s latest voluntary survey of 36 states, which did not include Pennsylvania or New Jersey, about 98,000 school bus drivers experienced more than 66,000 illegal passes in a single day. Out of the slew of companies offering the stop arm-focused service, some outfit a certain number of buses in a district as a deterrent, while companies like BusPatrol prefer to equip every single bus with a camera.

Justin Meyers, president and CEO of BusPatrol, said the data the company has collected from the roughly 40,000 buses with this technology show a 46% reduction in violations over three years. The company claims 90% of the violators it catches do not go on to reoffend. Meyers said the company deploys a “violator-funded” model where districts pay nothing to install the cameras or maintain the computing infrastructure. The company, he said, recoups expenses through the fines issued.

“Issuing a ticket isn’t just about issuing a ticket or collecting revenue,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to permanently change that driver’s behavior forever.”

For now, the district picked the 20 buses to be included in the pilot based on driver feedback, Fleming said. The district operates 186 routes internally, and the participating buses are evenly split between bus depots in Northeast Philadelphia and Southwest Philadelphia. The pilot would also determine whether the district would ask partner contractors that provide buses to install cameras as well.