A Montgomery County school bus deploys BusPatrol’s technology while picking up children in Silver Spring, Maryland, on March 24.
Photographer: Greg Kahn for Bloomberg BusinessweekThe AI School Bus Camera Company Blanketing America in Tickets
BusPatrol says its technology helps curb dangerous driving at no cost to cities. Public records from across the US often tell a different story.
Every weekday morning outside the 16-story apartment complex at 1400 East-West Highway in Silver Spring, Maryland, students step onto big yellow buses that take them to school. It’s not a particularly pleasant spot: The building faces a fenced-off construction site across six lanes humming with Washington metro-area commuter traffic.
But this is an important place for Montgomery County. In addition to students, the buses are collecting valuable data every time they stick out their stop signs (“stop arms,” in transportation lingo) and flash their red lights. Artificial-intelligence-powered cameras attached to these buses record vehicles that fail to halt—vehicles, in other words, that violate the state law requiring all lanes of traffic to halt for a stopped school bus with its stop arm extended. The footage is sent to local police for review. If they decide the law was broken, the driver receives a $250 ticket in the mail. There are a lot of scofflaws near 1400 East-West Highway. More than 11,500 tickets have been issued here over the past decade, making it among the county’s most heavily ticketed stops.