By Nikita Biryukov
Lawmakers have proposed a system to automate tickets for drivers who pass school buses as they slow and stop to drop off passengers, saying changes must be made to protect children from careless motorists.
The plan is reminiscent of New Jersey’s doomed push for red-light cameras more than a decade ago, but the legislation’s proponents say allowing automated ticketing would help improve roadway safety and educate drivers on traffic laws that require they stop when school buses activate flashing red lights and children begin to disembark.
“This bill is very important to the safety of our children. We’ve seen so many numerous instances back and forth over the years of accidents happening because of irrational drivers just blowing past a stop sign when children are getting on the bus,” Assemblyman Sterling Stanley (D-Middlesex) said during a legislative hearing Thursday.
The proposal would allow towns to install outboard cameras on school buses, whether on their own or in partnership with a vendor, that would automatically record drivers who pass a bus as children are embarking or disembarking and, upon approval from law enforcement, fine them $250. Unlike manually flagged violations, the automated violations would add no car insurance points.
We all sort of need to do a readjustment to our traffic patterns and remember that the school buses are on the roads.
– Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt
Sen. Declan O’Scanlon (R-Monmouth), a longtime opponent of red-light cameras, warned the bill would lead to a slew of faulty tickets issued to well-meaning drivers.
“We’ve all been in that dilemma zone when you’re right near a bus as it’s stopping. The yellow lights are flashing. Do I stop? Is he almost going to go by me? What do I do?” he said. “You proceed with caution. That’s perfectly reasonable, and if you’re passing a school bus in a situation like that where now you wouldn’t get a ticket because it’s reasonable, you would get a ticket under this system.”
New Jersey law requires motorists on either side of an undivided roadway to stop at least 25 feet from school buses that are dropping off or picking up children. Drivers on the opposite side of a divided roadway are permitted to continue moving but must proceed at no more than 10 miles per hour until the bus starts rolling.
Under existing law, bus drivers record violations at their discretion using onboard cameras and forward them to law enforcement. First-time violators can face fines of at least $100, up to 15 days jail time, the same amount of community service, and five car insurance points. On a second offense, the fines increase to $250.
The bill, which cleared the Assembly Education Committee in a unanimous bipartisan vote Thursday, would raise penalties for manually enforced violations to $250 on the first offense, $500 on the second, and remove the possibility of jail time for an initial breach.
The school bus monitoring proposal in some ways resembles an ill-fated 2008 pilot program that installed red-light cameras at intersections in some New Jersey towns.
The program was plagued with problems. Misalignments between traffic light timings and the cameras resulted in false positives and lawsuits that extended partial refunds to hundreds of thousands of motorists before the program shuttered in 2014.
Detractors argued tickets issued under the program did more to fill municipal coffers than it did to improve public safety, adding law enforcement was incentivized to approve citations where no actual violation occurred.
“It was in name only. They would review, and the cop spent like a fraction of a second on each one,” O’Scanlon said. “Any time there was a way to generate money, the ticket was issued, and they would leave it up to the motorist to have to come into court, which no one would do.”
Dale Florio, a lobbyist for Bus Patrol, which operates school bus monitoring systems, said those incentives would be less present under the school bus plan, noting districts could install the cameras without an outside vendor or sever compensation to vendors from fines issued.
“They can set up some sort of revenue sharing program or, increasingly, we’re seeing where the district/municipality would pay just a monthly subscription fee, so it’s not based on whatever amount of fines that have been levied,” he told the New Jersey Monitor.
The Department of Transportation in a 2013 report said select types of traffic collisions decreased at intersections with red light cameras but warned the data was too limited to draw conclusions on the cameras’ effectiveness as a traffic safety tool.
Crashes that kill children getting off a school bus are rare. In a report published earlier this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported 76 pedestrians aged 18 and younger were killed in vehicular crashes nationwide between 2013 and 2022.
Of those, 39 were killed by a school bus or other vehicle used for school transportation. The agency’s definition of pedestrian includes any person on foot, meaning those fatality statistics include school-aged children who were not departing a bus when they were killed.
But motorists frequently pass by stopped school buses. A stop-arm camera pilot program that ran between Sept. 25 and Nov. 20 of last year in Woodbridge found that, on average, 17.5 cars drove past a stopped school bus each weekday.
“I think this is outside the realm of a red-light camera,” said Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia (R-Sussex). “I think this is very different. I truly believe that there are New Jersey drivers who are ignorant to the fact that they have to keep an eye out for that arm that comes out that says ‘stop.’”
