Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - It's been over three weeks since the City of Buffalo's school bus stop arm program went live, and already, thousands of drivers have received tickets for illegally passing a school bus.
The program initially had a 90-day warning period, which began in July. Over 4,000 drivers were issued a warning for illegally passing a school bus. The warning period ended Oct. 1, and since then, over 2,250 drivers have been ticketed.
"Unfortunately, at BusPatrol, we see videos every single week of children jumping out of the way of a speeding driver passing a school bus illegally. But the program that the city of Buffalo and Buffalo Public Schools has built out for the community here is a system that does automated enforcement around school bus stop arm infractions," said President of BusPatrol America Justin Meyers. "Every single school bus operated by Buffalo Public Schools is equipped with a 4k camera system on the exterior of the busses and an AI system that watches those cameras and it detects a violation."
The AI system is an object recognition algorithm, which reviews and analyses thousands of video entries from across the country, and periodically improves based on the data it sees.
"It knows when the lights are flashing, and if a car passes. It captures, what I call, the '30-second evidence package,' takes footage from all the relevant video angles and uploads it to the cloud," Meyers stated. "Then three layers of human review - review that evidence package internally at BusPatrol to make sure that it meets the letter of the law in the state of New York, that there's not some extenuating circumstance like the bus driver waving someone by, or a police officer waving them by, or something like that."
After the review is complete, the driver will receive a $250 ticket in the mail that includes pictures of them passing the school bus, a picture of their license plate, a GPS image of the exact location, a time-stamp of when it happened, and a link to watch the video.
"We protect the lives of the family members and extended community who stand with those children each morning. Sometimes you have a parent there, a grandparent, a brother or sister. We want to protect each of them. Our goal is not to penalize you financially," Deputy Mayor Rashied McDuffie stated. "Our goal is compliance. We want to see you comply with these requirements, and quite honestly, we want to see you comply with the rest of them. We don't want to have you abide by just a school bus arm, and then you get near a school and you're going 50 miles an hour."
For anyone that has received a ticket for passing a school bus and believes it to be unjust, they can request a hearing with Buffalo's Traffic Parking Violation Bureau.