Following a new law that will require motion sensors be installed on all school buses to protect student pedestrians, two bills in New Jersey aim to further increase safety at school bus stops.
While S211 on stop-arm video enforcement programs for illegal passers has not progressed since being introduced in January, another bill introduced this week seeks to add video to all school buses equipped with crossing control gates at the front bumper.
A3512, introduced April 4 by Assemblywoman Patricia Eagan Jones, is scant on details according to its filing, but it does state that video cameras would be “adjacent to the crossing control arm.”
The crossing gate, per state law, extends 5.5 feet from the bus each time the loading door opens.
Since implementing the law in 1996, New Jersey is one of 16 states to require crossing gates on school buses, while we reported in May 2014 that four other states require them on some buses while another 11 states have no requirement.
Jeff Cassel of the School Bus Safety Company and former safety director at Laidlaw Education Services told School Transportation News that his analysis of the industry indicates about 60 percent of the national fleet, about 480,000 school buses, are equipped with the safety device to force students to cross farther in front of the bus so the driver can see them.
Since the wide scale implementation of crossing control gates over the last couple of decades, Cassel added that student fatalities at the front of school buses have dropped considerably, according to data published in the National School Bus Loading and Unloading Survey produced by the Kansas State Department of Education.
Over the past 10 years, an average of nine and a half students have died each year in the school bus loading and unloading zone, with students ages 7 and younger being most at risk by a factor of more than three times that of older students, Cassel calculated. New Jersey’s motion sensor law, passed and signed in January, is termed Abigail’s Law named after toddler Abigail Kuberiet, who was struck and killed by her brother’s school bus after wandered in front of the vehicle.
Meanwhile, New Jersey’s stop-arm video enforcement bill would cover both “high resolution color digital recorded images” and video that shows the stopped school bus with its red lights flashing date and time of an incident along with the license plate and make and model of the violating vehicle.
