How technology is making school buses safer

Ensuring the safety of the millions of children that ride school buses daily is a top priority. New and more advanced technologies are helping school districts protect students both on and off the bus.
Izvor: a&s International
E-mail: redakcija@asadria.com

School buses are one of the safest modes of transportation on the road. In fact, students are 70 times more likely to arrive safely at school if traveling by school bus rather than by car, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Even so, recent school bus accidents, such as the 2016 Chattanooga, Tennessee, bus crash that resulted in the deaths of six students have highlighted the need for stronger safety measures.

Today, a combination of public awareness, driver and student bus safety training, and installation of integrated onboard safety technologies are essential for modern school bus safety management, according to Justin Malcolm, Director of Product Management for Safe Fleet. By deploying a combination of different safety solutions, school buses across the U.S. can better ensure the safety of the precious cargo they transport.

Using Cameras and GPS Tracking
Nowadays there are many different types of safety and security solutions for school buses. Cameras are a common safety measure, and in the past have mostly been installed inside buses to monitor and keep track of what is happening aboard. However, advancements in camera technology and accompanying software can now offer school districts real-time video footage of what is happening both outside and inside the bus. This is important since students are most vulnerable during the loading and unloading process.

While the deployment of stop arms and crossing arms have helped reduce student injuries and fatalities over the years, implementing stop arm cameras on the outside of the bus is helping penalize drivers overtaking stopped school buses.

“Stop-arm cameras track any illegal passing and some states allow districts to use these cameras to issue tickets to those drivers,” said Gene Ballard, Smart Bus Program Manager at Kajeet. “Rearview or backup cameras provide drivers another point of reference to ensure there are no pedestrians walking behind the school bus. Additionally, bus drivers have a silent alarm or panic button, which they can press to alert their transportation department of an issue or emergency on their school bus,” he added.

Leslie Kilgore, VP of Engineering at Thomas Built Buses (TBB), explained how using a 360-degree camera, such as TBB’s PV360, could provide a 360-degree bird’s-eye view of the exterior of the bus. “Unlike other cameras in the market that provide images on split screens, the PV360 camera shows full visibility all the way around the bus with screens that are stitched together to create one image,” she said. The PV360 uses four cameras to provide bus drivers with real-time video images of everything that is happening outside the bus, without constantly switching views. “If the driver needs a closer look, he or she can toggle between cameras for a closer look. This technology is especially important since most accidents involving a school bus happen outside the bus.”

GPS tracking is another popular solution used for school bus safety. Through GPS tracking, school districts can know the exact location of all buses in its fleet. “GPS technology also provides speed reports, such as the posted speed vs. the actual bus speed. So if bus drivers are speeding, transportation departments can now see who is speeding, where they were speeding, and by how much,” Ballard explained.

Installing GPS telematics units also provides school transport managers with important information ranging from real-time bus location; school bus driver’s driving behavior; geofencing alerts when vehicles exit and enter predefined areas or routes; and maintenance, according to Morgan Minster, Marketing Manager at Wireless Links.

How Wi-Fi Changed the Game
Aside from improved camera and GPS telematics technology, companies have developed a wide variety of solutions to enhance school bus safety. Much of this development has been brought on and made possible by the increased availability of Wi-Fi networks and the overall IoT revolution.

“Technology is bringing more and more safety solutions to the school bus. The first solution to bring school buses into the 21st century is internet access,” Ballard said. “As school buses become well-connected vehicles, there needs to be a factor that ties all of the technology together. And that connecting piece is internet access. With Wi-Fi on the school bus, districts get the access they need to keep moving forward in the connected world while saving money and expanding their capabilities to integrate any Wi-Fi enabled solutions.”

Kilgore observed, “Cellular data and Wi-Fi has enabled apps to function and to be accessible. In addition, cellular data also enables some technologies like onboard telematics to receive over-the-air updates much like a standard computer update. This saves the fleet managers and technicians time and money and makes the school bus safer overall by allowing communication with the transportation department.”

Malcolm noted that adoption of live streaming, which offers the ability to tap into installed video cameras to assess onboard emergencies, has been hampered by the high costs of cellular data plans. “Deployments of mobile Wi-Fi will help reduce the adoption barriers to live video streaming, by sharing data plan costs across applications.”

Additionally, filtered Wi-Fi — meaning students can only access educational, safe sites — on school buses allows students to focus on their homework or educational games, which keeps them entertained and reduces the chances of fighting, according to Ballard. “They won’t be spending their time on social media or watching TV. And students can gain an additional 20 days of instructional time with Wi-Fi on their school bus,” he explained.

New Technologies Creating Safer Buses
There are many new and innovative technologies on the market today that are being deploying on buses to increase safety and security in and around the bus.

“When developing technologies for our industry, we strive to hit the right balance, bringing to market only the innovations that make sense for the customers. In other words, the right technology at the right time. We don’t innovate for the sake of innovating,” Kilgore said. “Instead, we try to address problems in the industry and work to make school buses safer, more efficient, easier to maintain, and to provide a lower total cost of ownership.”

One such technology being developed is pedestrian detection. TBB is currently developing its own pedestrian detection solution, which will be comprised of LED ground lights on the cross-view mirrors as well as multiple radar units on the 77 GHz frequency band installed around the exterior of a Thomas Built bus. “These higher frequency radars, which are used for autonomous vehicles and high-resolution meteorological observations, will allow for more precise detection and measurement of a pedestrian or object within 10 feet of the front, back or side of the school bus. The entire traditional danger zone will be visible. When a pedestrian is detected, the system will alert the driver on an in-cabin tablet, as well as through caution lights on the cross-view mirrors,” Kilgore explained.

Safe Fleet is also working on smart pedestrian detection technologies that use a combination of video, sensors, artificial intelligence and deep learning, which will help analyze and reduce future accidents. “Safe Fleet is currently working on a number of school bus danger zone safety technologies that both improve visibility around the bus and analyze and alert both students and drivers of any hazards in the danger zone. These technologies working together will analyze whether an oncoming vehicle is likely to pass illegally, and warn students and drivers not to cross. These technologies will improve visibility and send both visual and audible alerts to drivers when motion is detected near the school bus at a stop to reduce collisions,” Malcolm said.

Lane departure and collision avoidance warnings, which can alert the driver before an impending accident occurs, are also being adopted by school districts.

While technologies like collision avoidance and pedestrian detection are considered new technologies for the school bus industry, Kilgore pointed out that they are not necessarily new to the transportation industry.

Challenges to Safety and Security
One of the biggest challenges school districts face when wanting to deploy new technology is budgetary. “School budgets are limited and when it comes to purchasing multiple school buses or equipping just a few buses with state-of-the-art technology, most school districts opt to purchase more buses rather than a few with the latest in safety technology,” Kilgore said.

“Budget is consistently a roadblock to advancing school buses with the latest technology,” Ballard said. To meet this challenge, Kajeet has reduced the upfront cost of its solution with a new program, SmartBus Select. “This program brings the first-year cost down to US$840. This fixed monthly rate for this all-in-one program includes: SmartBus hardware, installation kit, installation services, data plan with 4G LTE connectivity on six North American wireless carriers, and GPS services,” he explained.

Urgency, as observed by Minster, is another challenge. “Although schools and districts are aware of the benefits, they are not urgent to pass the necessary budget to equip school buses with these types of technologies or they do not feel that they should invest in these solutions at the moment. This causes delays in the implementation in these solutions which is a shame as all can benefit from these types of technologies to ensure student safety.”

Malcolm noted connectivity challenges, high cost data plans, and IT networking infrastructure knowledge as obstacles preventing faster adoption of newer technologies. “Also with the proliferation of data from all these technologies, school administrators are overwhelmed by system operations and data analysis,” he added.

Seon, a Safe Fleet brand, has tackled these problems by offering a completely integrated out-of-the-box solution for school transportation that combines video, route operations, tracking and student ridership technology to make it easier for administrators to pull meaningful data that improves student safety. Additionally, its Certified Wireless Network Administrators can help districts architect their wireless networks to handle the demands of video transmission.

A Future of Smart School Buses
Despite budget limitations, school buses will continue to become not only safer and more secure, but also smarter. With regulations changing to better ensure student safety, along with increased connectivity and advancements in technology, school buses are bound to become smarter — not just because of available technologies, but because student safety will demand it.

Deadly school bus accidents are driving US lawmakers at both the federal and state levels to strengthen the regulations that govern school bus safety.

New regulations are oftentimes an unfortunate result of tragic accidents. For example, the death of a two-year-old girl in New Jersey resulted in Abigail’s Law. This law requires school buses in the state to be equipped with sensors to detect objects in the front and back of the bus. Then earlier this year in May, a school bus accident in New Jersey, which resulted in the death of one student and a teacher, brought increased attention to school bus safety. In response to the accident, state lawmakers passed a bill requiring all new school buses to have three-point lap and shoulder belts – previously school buses were only required to have two-point lap belts.

Nationally, school bus safety is governed by strict regulations set forth by the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS). “School buses must meet 42 FMVSS requirements, more than any other vehicle on the road,” explained Leslie Kilgore, VP of Engineering at Thomas Built Buses (TBB). “Beyond the federal requirements, individual states have their own safety regulations, plus the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) make recommendations on regulations and restrictions to further enhance the safety of school buses.” According to the NHTSA, in a single day more than 104,000 school bus drivers observed 77,972 vehicles illegally passing school buses in 2017. To combat this, the NCSL reports there are currently 15 states that allow local governments or school districts to use cameras to capture images and issue tickets to drivers illegally passing stopped school buses.

Recently, the NTSB recommended all US school buses be equipped with lap-shoulder belts and electronic stability control. While some states take these recommendations to heart, others are still considering the recommendation. Currently, only eight states — Arkansas, California, Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York and Texas — in the U.S. have laws requiring school buses to have seatbelts, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).

Electronic stability control, which assists school bus drivers by detecting when a school bus is unstable and corrects the path of the bus before a rollover or loss of control occurs, can help eliminate accidents before they happen. Kilgore noted Canada requires all new school buses be equipped with electronic stability control. “With time, more and more of these safety features will become standard on school buses. Today, our new Saf-T-Liner C2 school buses already come equipped with electronic stability control and engine telematics as standard equipment. More features will follow, due to regulations or needs within the industry. But it will take time and further education before all school buses across the United States and Canada feature all these technologies,” Kilgore said.