PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – A company in charge of school bus stop-arms rolled out a new piece of technology that is designed to accurately detect and deter violations to ensure the safety of students who ride the bus.
Safe Fleet showcased the new technology at their national launch event in Ponte Vedra Beach Sunday morning.
School safety officials said it is not uncommon to see cars driving right by a school bus’s stop sign.
“You wanna know what keeps us up at night? That’s it,” Osceola County Assistant Director of School Bus Transportation Randy Wheeler said.
In fact, there are nearly 250,000 occurrences on the average school day, according to the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services.
A number that prompted companies like Safe Fleet to try and find a solution.
“Today we are launching our product in our legal passing suite of student transportation. So this is called, SAVES “Stop Arm Violation Enforcement System” and basically, we’re using the latest technology, computer vision, machine learning and advanced AI and analytics to detect when vehicles illegally pass a stopped school bus,” Safe Fleet Senior Vice President Mike Hagan said.
With other systems, bus drivers would have to watch cars go by and then hit a button on the dashboard to even just review the video after the fact to try and enforce it. Now with this system, it’s done automatically.
The system has been tested in Osceola County where Wheeler helps manage the technology that gets the kids to and from school.
He said on just three buses, they have already detected over 500 violations since December.
“As a school bus operator that’s terrifying to us because that means all the kids that we rally to the side of the road are potentially in peril,” Wheeler said. “The stop enforcement system is an opportunity to do some behavior modification to the drivers, and of course ultimate goal is to improve the safety of the students.”
Osceola, Collier, Lee, Alachua and Flagler counties have committed to using the SAVES system in their school districts.
Safe Fleet said it hopes many more in the state and around the country will follow.
A Florida bill indicates that any money the district gets from violation tickets must go back to the school district and Safe Fleet said that money can be used to cover the installation of the system.