Stop passing school buses
A camera attached to a school bus in a company yard in Medford. Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost
STOP!
When you see a school bus that has extended its stop sign arm so that it can let children on or off, the only way to avoid a steep traffic ticket in Suffolk County is to stop.
It’s also the only sure way to protect those children from serious physical harm, and to protect drivers from consequences far more daunting than a ticket.
Several months into Suffolk’s program monitoring school-bus stop-arm cameras, however, too many people are failing to stop.
The program began giving out tickets in May, with revenue for the year from the fines budgeted at $2.5 million. But the program has already collected over $3 million, most of it in the summer, and county officials now expect the program will provide just over $10 million in revenue by year's end as violations exploded once school began.
It's a new program, and kinks may exist, generating tickets where drivers would not instinctively stop — for example, on main arteries when buses are stopped on parallel service roads. Adjustments or driver education may be needed.
But reckless or clueless drivers passing stopped school buses is a serious problem. Between 2007 and 2016, approximately 100 pedestrians younger than 18 were killed in crashes related to school buses in the United States.
Instituting these programs has changed behaviors. In Cobb County, Georgia, which operates approximately 1,000 buses and has for years had a camera program, fewer than 2% of violators repeat the offense.
Hopefully that will be true in Suffolk. The fines are $250 for a first offense, $275 for a second, and $300 for a third. At that rate, with the camera company taking 45% of the fee, Suffolk’s projected annual revenue of $10 million equates to about 80,000 violations a year. That’s a terrifying number when it describes children endangered.
This is one stream of revenue that would ideally dry up quickly, as drivers unswayed by the fear of striking children hopefully prove more protective of their bank accounts.
About 10% of Suffolk’s buses lack the cameras because one bus company, Huntington Coach Corp., has not yet signed off on the deal, though it says it's in the process of finalizing the contract. Right now about 500 buses in the county lack the cameras, and 5,000 have them.
Nassau County is still caught up in the process of evaluating proposals from vendors and getting buy-in from districts. It’s a process that should have gone much more quickly, especially considering that both counties passed laws authorizing the programs in 2019, shortly after the state did. Nassau needs to get moving.
And drivers need to slow down, care a little more about safety, and relax a little more about getting to the next thing as quickly as possible.
Because the damage done by breaking this law can cost a lot more than a few hundred bucks.
MEMBERS OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD are experienced journalists who offer reasoned opinions, based on facts, to encourage informed debate about the issues facing our community.
