I'm tired of giving out $500 tickets

twice again this morning people drove through the school bus stop arm. 

When someone approaches I fear is going to run my stop arm I push the green button that marks the cameras we have on modern school buses. 

That way when I get back to base they record the infraction and. $500 ticket goes out by the local police.  

The rule is simple, when the amber lights come out warning you of a pending stop you slow down.  Don't speed up trying to beat it.  The ticket occurs as you go by the stop arm.  You are on camera

We could use that photo system in my state.  Seems pretty simple, but I see people drive right past stopped buses all the time. Are they deliberate scofflaws, or just not paying attention? I mean, we are just trying to keep the kids safe right?  

Happens all the time around here too, I live on the bus route and the drivers use their horn very well when people drive past the stop sign/arm. I know Seattle is putting cameras on their buses, but I don't think my little district is.

I'm with you. 

That being said, please don't have conversations with parents while parked with all the warning lights on and cameras rolling.

The solution to the problem is to scrap that law and teach kids how to cross the street. Nonsense like this is making kids dumb and (I'm convinced) why I see people just walk into the road/parking lot without even looking. Every day.

In reply to Zomby Woof : kids as young as 5 ride my bus.  Their attention span is less than 2 minutes if that .   Even high school age kids get tunnel vision when they see the bus coming and they aren't there ready for it.  

I turn on the ambers when I approach a stop and try to give plenty of warning.  

$500 is a lot of money but children are worth even more.  Give the kids a break will you please?  

$500 is NOT enough. It should be $1000 fine PLUS 4 points on the drivers license. It is beyond ridiculous how many people I see on a daily basis not stopping for an already stopped and flashing school bus. I have 3 kids that goes to school and home on a bus. We don't even have cameras on the bus. 

frenchyd said:

In reply to Zomby Woof :   Give the kids a break will you please?  

 

Sure.

Give them a trophy while you're at it

The most predictable thing about kids is their unpredictability.   Agree totally with frenchyd.   I also can attest to the knuckleheads that try to race against your School Bus.   In NYC they didn't have cameras aboard buses.   I always tried to let traffic go by prior to sending the sign out.  

In reply to Sine_Qua_Non : I doubt increasing it to $1000 will make much change.  It hasn't when it went from $300 to $500  

I honestly believe the only thing that will have an impact is publicity 

In reply to Dirtydog :Are you sure they don't have camera's ?  I'd think the insurance industry will have forced the bus companies to install camera's.  For a long time bus companies were a prime target of liability claims.  Jr would slip on the stairs entering or leaving the bus, do a face plant, knock out some teeth and lawsuit time.  

Now they show Jrs parents he didn't hold onto the hand rail and lawsuit goes away, no lawyers involved.  

In reply to Zomby Woof :karma is a strange thing, that kid you run over might have been the doctor that could have saved your life. Or maybe been the quarterback who took your team to the Super Bowl 

Or maybe when you have grandchildren not run them over.  

In reply to NEALSMO : the schedule we are required to keep makes bus drivers hate those conversations.  We can't be one minute late to a bus stop or the helicopter moms have the district in speed dial because they have to get to work

Can't be early to a pickup or the GPS tells district and we have to go back to pick up any kids we missed

Yet I have 33 stop lights that can change my time by as much as 3 minutes per light.  Some kids load the bus like they are giown execution, and at least once a week I need to pull the bus over for the usual trouble makers doing the usual crab ( or do you spell that with a P?) 

The  high school doesn't have room for all 220 buses at one time so we arrive in tiers.  Miss your tier time by less than a minute and you might wind up in tier three instead of the first tier.  That might put you 7 or 8  minutes behind picking up the elementary school kids.  Those moms/ dads really helicopter!! (can't blame them they have to get to work) and that puts you behind for your midday charers which makes you late picking up the high school kids.  

Luckily a lot of them drive  cars or ride with those who do, because I'm supposed to carry 98 in a bus that can only legally carry 77  

Same thing with the after school activity run  there I'm supposed to carry 269 but seldom carry more than 20  but spread over 6 routes.  

As it is a good day I'm done by 6:30 PM Having left the house at 5:30 AM 

School buses are probably the worst solution to an artificially created problem, ever.

When I was a kid, I used to spend 2 hours per day on one of those yellow, rolling torture prisons.  Bullies thrived in that environment.  I can't count how many fights I was provoked into.  I used to carry a steel lunchbox- one guess as to what that got used for.  

Frankly, I'm amazed that parents these days (or, really, ever) would entrust their barely-done-with-breastfeeding toddler to a complete stranger to be driven miles from home in a big metal coffin with no seatbelts and left in the company of similar strangers. 

The case for home-schooling gets stronger by the day.  

But, yeah, as long as these big rolling roadblocks are out there...give 'em a break.  

Edit: who else has those annoying strobe-light things on the tops of their local buses?  They ought to only come on in daylight.  When it's dark out, those things are beyond distracting.  

As of 2 years ago when I last  drove them, the company I drove for, there were no cameras.  GPS has since been installed, which the Drivers need to log into.   There had always been talk of Stop sign Cameras though, as well as in bus cameras.

In reply to volvoclearinghouse :part of the reason we have 220 buses to serve a modest sized school district is no kid is supposed to be on a bus for more than 30 minutes.  

As for bullies the cameras have helped with that.  If a kid is a bully he rides in a small bus maybe by himself with a para ( trained adult) to keep him strapped in and seated.  

Regarding seat belts those 40 foot long buses have a very enviable safety record.  More kids have drowned in a bus than would have been saved by wearing seat belts .  

Home schooling ?  Sorry we will have to disagree.  While some kids flourish under home schooling, not all do.  A lot of parents simply would make miserable teachers not to mention earning an income.  Most families now days need a dual income.  Plus lack of social training puts them at a major disadvantage.  

That really amazes me.  I take the passing a school bus with lights on as the worst moving violation there is.  There was a wive's tail when I was getting my license that said it was like 9 points (out of ten) on your license.  I assume that is not true, but I still think that way.  Of course, I have kids so I would stop no matter what.  

I put my kids on and off the bus a lot, and if someone came around their bus, they'd have a bigger issue than a ticket.  

Bus drivers around here have the stop signs out long before they actually stop the bus, so you never know exactly where they are stopping in the afternoons. On many occasion I have stopped, only to have the bus blow by me by several houses. The drivers around here are pretty horrible and have been every since Durham took over. That doesn't help when it comes to driving near them. 

In this age of distracted driving, teaching kids to look before crossing a street, will do a lot more to keeping them alive, than expecting cell phone mom to stop for a bus. Some of the harshest discipline I've ever handed down to my kids, was for not looking before doing anything around a vehicle.

In reply to Toyman01 :

Good for you. But not all feel as you do.  Or have the experience you do.  Some of my students come from parts of the world where there is no auto traffic,  or they need to go into a city to expeiance it.  

I give a teacher from China a ride to school in the morning. Every day she has a new question for me 

Today's was do I have to stop at all stop signs even if there are no cars coming?  

In reply to Toyman01 : they must have really old buses. Modern buses won't put out the stop arm until you come to a full stop.  

I'll admit when I first drove one after driving the old manual doors it took me a bit of getting used to.  

I liked warning drivers ahead that I was stopping, I seemed to get fewer running the stop arm that way.  I'll admit I drove past a couple cars because of early deployment of the stop arm.  

The rule is 100 feet ahead of the stop  up to 30 mph and 300 feet over30 mph   

So now when the ambers come on that's the only warning you get.  Next you are either stopped or get a ticket in the mail. 

Does your camera also capture the stop sign out or have some sort of interlock which prevents it from being activated without the stop sign out? If not it sounds like a lawyer could get most of those thrown out.

In reply to pinchvalve :

My scariest experience was when someone passed the bus on the right. One wheel up on the curb and one inches from the bus.  At the last second I slammed the door shut right on a girls nose, Yep blood all over but she's alive. 

That happened 5 years ago. I still have nightmares

I wonder if the camera system would make it past the SC legislature. They have already axed all other forms of mailed, camera generated tickets, as unconstitutional. All tickets must be generated by a human being that must be present in court when the time comes, or the case is dismissed. 

Busing seems to be one of those things that got hit by budget restrictions around here. They used to come in to neighborhoods and drive around for most of the stops and I'm pretty sure nobody ever had to cross major roads to get on regardless of age. Now the whole school schedule is based on using as few buses as possible and they only enter neighborhoods for the elementary kids.  Starting in 6th grade you are pretty much guaranteed to cross a busy road.

In reply to MrJoshua :it does more than that, it's a video that shows the drivers face, license number, car color, and car.  Oh, yes the stop arm is in the foreground