Speeding in school zones is a problem that may get less media attention than illegally passing stopped school buses, yet this violation also puts schoolchildren at risk every day. With both infractions, cameras are enabling cities and local police to step up enforcement and increase penalties.
The city of Cool Valley in North St. Louis County, Mo., worked with B&W Sensors to install its Multiple Vehicle SpeedTracking (MVST) system to assist law enforcement agencies faced with stretched resources.
The city estimated there were 50 to 60 speeding violations per hour, on average, before Mayor Viola Murphy pushed for the tracking system. Since installing the MVST system in fall 2010, speeding infractions have dropped by more than 90 percent to four violations per hour, and the new goal is seeing it drop to one violation per hour.
During the pre-deployment test period in spring 2010, data captured from the pole-mounted cameras on South Florissant Road revealed that 57 vehicles per hour were aggressively speeding. Aggressive speeders were defined as vehicles going 11 mph or more than the posted 30-mph speed limit, and they accounted for 8 percent of all the traffic on this road.
Already, the city has found the automated speed enforcement technology of MVST has created a safer environment around two elementary schools. There is significant pedestrian traffic in the two-block area surrounding Cool Valley Elementary School and Our Lady of Guadalupe School, with approximately 160 children walking or biking to both schools. And this neighborhood is often the scene for aggressive drivers and numerous speed-related accidents, according to the city. On Thanksgiving Day in 2004, a pedestrian was struck and killed while crossing the school zone on Florissant Road.
Ensuring safe walkways around public schools is a top priority of the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) National Partnership, which recently held a webinar on how student transportation professionals and the schools they serve can benefit from partnering with the national advocacy group.
Presenter Peter Hurst, transportation options program specialist with Boulder Valley (Colo.) School District, stressed how important it is for various stakeholders — school and transportation officials, law enforcement, traffic engineering, city council members, and county or city agencies — to work together on the common cause of making school zones safer for children.
Hurst said the high traffic congestion and rushed, unsafe driving practices during busy school drop-off and pick-up times present significant safety risks to students. Much of the time parents are the ones who are driving too fast or unpredictably because they are in a hurry to take the kids to school before heading to work.
“There are lots of issues with safety that come from people driving unsafely — parents rush, drive erratically and make illegal turns all the time. I wish we had a police presence in school zones during drop-off,” Hurst noted. “During both drop-off and pick-up, parents are distracted by cell phones — in one case, a parent drove over a child’s foot.”
SRTS grants can assist cities that, like Cool Valley, need help improving safety in school zones plagued by speeding motorists or other road hazards.
