So I'm already assuming all Amazon trucks, any other large delivery vehicles, city fleet cars, city buses,Google maps/TomTom and others with those 360° cameras all do this already. Now I have to worry about school buses too? From what I understand, Flock (ALPR) cameras also do facial recognition and tracking (is this right?). WHERE DOES IT END
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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This is the new, improved USA: whatever regulation still exists is being stripped down as we speak and new companies are seizing newly created "opportunities" without any sense of propriety, not even to speak of morals or ethics.
Joke’s on you, they don’t even have enough school bus drivers for my kid’s school so they pay parents $50 a month to drive them.
Joke's on them for investing in education when the current administration would rather no one went to school.
Dammit. I'm going to feel really bad when I have to start flipping off school busses.
People who pass busses should be curb stomped in the street not spyed on by big brother.
Agreed, the same for racing through active school zones. The beating for not slowing down and moving over for a tow truck or stopped emergency vehicle should be only slightly more mild. These are as key to driving as red=stop and green=go.
You can bypass this surveillance by not illegally passing school busses. A lot of the advancement in surveillance is driven by people doing stupid shit…
Just like I can bypass doorbell cams by not going on people's porches?
Oh wait, that's not true at all is it
The school buses will be equipped with license plate readers that read license plates of every car they drive past. Parked cars too.
Is parking your car "doing stupid shit"?
As noted by Reason, stop-arm cameras have been criticized for not delivering promised safety benefits, but they’ve nonetheless generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the companies that deploy them. And according to the report, BusPatrol now wants to turn those cameras into license plate readers. Instead of activating when a specific law is allegedly being violated, they’ll now reportedly be live at all times, capturing data on any vehicle within sight of a school bus that can then be sold to the law-enforcement agencies BusPatrol already counts as customers.
You can bypass this surveillance by not existing near school busses /s
FYI I'm a school bus driver and our buses are equipped with these BusPatrol cameras. Our director of transportation told me about the financial arrangement, which I'm not sure most people know about. BusPatrol pays all costs relating to the cameras and their installation. They then get all of the ticket revenue generated ($300 per incident) until the cameras are paid for, after which the company splits the revenue with the school district (my boss told me this is a 50/50 split but Google says it's about 60/40 in favor of the company). The money that goes to the school district is further split (50/50) between the school system and the police department, who have the responsibility for reviewing the recordings and mailing out the tickets. The "until the cameras are paid for" part is interesting: according to my boss, the installation cost of the cameras for our 40 buses was in the neighborhood of $1.5 million dollars, which seems a bit improbable. $37,500 per camera?
The revenue these things generate has to be fucking enormous. I've had runs where I get passed by 10 to 15 cars with my lights on and stop sign out. The main benefit to me personally is lowered stress. I used to get genuinely angry at cars doing this, and I would waste time and attention span horn-blasting them (one time I even had a cop pass me like this, driving with one hand and looking at his cell phone in the other hand). Now I don't give a shit, knowing that they're (likely) getting a big ticket for it.
Why not just have the school district/police department set up and host the cameras themselves and keep all the revenue?
How are you supposed to do.that? They go to residential areas because their mission is to provide school transportation
Sorry, that was meant to be a joke reply to the original comment. I'll add a "/s" to it
You got down voted to hell, and I see why, but I want to address the second part of your statement because I find it more interesting. I saw a stat a while back that the average American gets in a car accident once every 8 years. My city was ~9/10 years and a city near me was every 12. Pretty good. Then covid hit and everyone now drives like they spent six months straight playing GTA (some of them did). Accidents are up, racing happens every night in every neighborhood, and people are aggressive and careless in their driving at the same time people are turning left from the inside lane across the other turn lane into the lane against the far curb. Did this decent into idiocy also happen where you live?
I do think people gave them a great scapegoat to advance their surveillance capacities.
Absolutely that happened where I live. Still going on. People drive like shit and are really aggro about it. Police do very little about it and the community hates the police anyway so we just put up with it.
They recently started doing a lot more digital surveillance/enforcement around here. PD and FD now have drones. My buddy lives by the fire station and we saw it take off and land a few times when we were having a BBQ the other day. Parts of the state now use photo radar on the freeway and it's coming to the rest of the state soon. We also have toll lanes and red light cameras. Flock has a presence, but I'm not sure how widespread. I've been riding my bikes because at least nobody bugs me on the trails apart from the occasional raccoon or flock of geese. I think it's a real privacy concern and we need to slow down before we let this tech replace the current ways of doing things.
I do see the sentiment against enforcement, but that absolutely extends to Officer Clanker. I think we should shift to enforcement by design. Too many roads are built in ways that encouraged speeding and make it feel comfortable. If you put rumbly bricks in school zones, no one will miss a sign.
My wife got a ticket from one of these things, along with 4 other people that you can clearly see in the evidence video they send you. A couple other cars knew to stop.
We live on the border with a state whose bus law makes no exception to the road being a divided highway. Apparently not even people who live in that state are aware, either. We learned the hard way.
The bus stopped on the other side of a 55mph road with a physical barrier down the middle. 4 lanes total.
Now we know the stupid law across the border. That bus alone probably generates $1200+ a day on that single stop on the highway.
I'm a school bus driver and we have these BusPatrol cameras on our buses. One of my stops in the morning is at a place where a divided highway becomes not-divided. In my state you don't have to stop for school buses on divided highways, but my stop is about ten feet into the not-divided area. Most people stop anyway but a lot of people don't. I've had people ask me whether they're supposed to stop or not and I have to tell them that I have no idea. The drivers are not involved with the cameras at all -- we don't make the determination of whether somebody gets a ticket or not and we're not told anything about how many tickets our cameras are generating.
[–]
cecinestpasunecommunication@lemmy.dbzer0.com
8 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)
(1 children)
So even if they weren't a walking surveillance apocalypse, they're an effective poor tax.
To be fair, people should definitely get fines for passing school buses. I'm more mad at the state for being different than the rest of the country and including divided highways in their school bus law.
including divided highways in their school bus law
Rural state? Whether or not divided highways make sense depends on whether or not kids are crossing these highways to get to their stops. Seems like that wouldn't happen anywhere but you never know. In my district (Philly suburb) we design our runs so that kids rarely have to cross any street at all, and never have to cross even just multi-lane roads (let alone divided highways).
That's the point of laws. You start with a concept everyone basically agrees with, then use it as a pretense to exploit whoever you want, and call it protection. Gradually fine-tune the targeting and expand the scope of the oppression, and often forget the original point.
[–]
cecinestpasunecommunication@lemmy.dbzer0.com
3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)
(1 children)
How does one come to 'think' like that? You've caught my morbid fascination.
The core idea is good. A law that isn't enforced is just a recommendation. There will be plenty of people who will just ignore it. Not unique to car drives, there are pretty much the same amount of people ignoring traffic laws with every transportation method, just when the size of the transportation method increases, so does the damage it can cause.
It would be kinda unfeasible for the bus driver to start writing down each cars license plate that passes by it when the bus has stopped. So similarly to speeding cameras which do lower the speed of cars within it's area of influence. A bus will carry around an area of influence inside which drivers are more inclined to follow the law.
Of course reality is that the system will be abused and badly implemented.
It would be kinda unfeasible for the bus driver to start writing down each cars license plate that passes by it when the bus has stopped.
Except that's a rare thing to happen because it's a serious crime. Plus there's other people in the bus. When I was in school we were supposed to help take notes to identify any cars that passed when they weren't supposed to
Except that’s a rare thing to happen because it’s a serious crime.
Lol it's not rare at all. I'm a school bus driver and it happens multiple times on each run. It's not uncommon to have multiple cars pass me at a single stop.
And that's very good, but an automated system and video evidence is still better. It eliminates the unreliability of human memory and perception. While any false positives could be easily dealt with case by case basis as the video evidence can be used by both sides.
Though yeah whatever it's actually necessary or current system is already good enough is up for a debate.
[–]
cecinestpasunecommunication@lemmy.dbzer0.com
0 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)
(1 children)
The entire concept of laws is insane delusional anti-materialism.
I'm not going to spend time on the inequities of punishment, the inefficacy of punishment (we're still punishing people for murder! Tons of them! Every year! Can you name a culture where its generally legal? I fucking can't!), the necessary selection and injustice of enforcement when trying to impose an often complex abstract ideal on reality through brute violence which is itself usually contradictory, the history of law as excuse, the inherent injustice of violence, or the problem brought up in this thread of variance between jurisdictions of law being used to exploit. Those are all issues that require volumes to fully understand or you've already picked a side on and its not worth arguing.
I'm just going to point out that if the goal was preventing bad thing, we would focus on training education infrastructure and constantly refined best practices to help us achieve the desired (lack of) result. That is what works. We know that's what works, because in the places where there's no power over others to be gained, or where the result is the most important to the powerful, that's what we've done for over a century, arguably for millennia, across every border and language and nearly every religion. It is in fact the foundation of modern safety, infields as diverse as architecture and medicine, where procedures and design conventions are optimized to reduce room for error without reducing the agency of practitioners. Things like hoses for different parts of general anesthesia being different sizes and the switches being linked in an appropriate gear ratio, doctors signing areas to be operated on before a surgery, or railings being built over long falls anywhere a person the system cares about might ever stand.
If people –especially kids– getting where they're going –especially school– safely and quickly were the priority, we would be building trains and getting cars off the use, with constant robust well maintained professional busses as a bridge to get us there. We don't do that. We build more highways and more cars to the exclusion of all that.
The idea that anyone thinks laws are a good tool for avoiding bad outcomes is endlessly frustrating. They're not in the top ten in use today, and that's not even what they're fucking for. That's like arguing I should use a floppy silicone dildo to put a screw into a hole while we're standing in the middle of a fully stocked hardware lending library. It was funny the first few times; now I just want to scream.
I do agree with your core idea and yeah we should work towards it, but in the meanwhile we cant ignore current reality either. It will take generations to unroot car centric worldview towards public transport and more people centric worldview and building said infrastructure takes time as well.
In the meanwhile there are people who ignore rules for their own benefit or just not caring and threat of an imminent punishment does reduce the amount of rule breaking until we can get to the society where the punishment is no longer necessary. Yes it's not perfect, it's just a patchwork solution and the efficacy of it can be questionable.
Like the current subject of full on surveillance camera is probably one of the worst and most exploitative ways to get the desired results, but at the same time. It can be rapidly implemented and will scare some people into more careful driving even if just around the bus. Though i assume there probably are some less invasive methods that can be rapidly implemented and will have a similar results, if even necessary at all as i don't have the data regarding how regular this occurance is.
[–]
cecinestpasunecommunication@lemmy.dbzer0.com
2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)
(1 children)
If your goal is avoiding bad outcomes, you change the environment to avoid bad outcomes.
Even outside eliminating cars, things like sharp curbs and physically protected bike lanes save lives, especially children's lives. If the goal were saving the lives of children, you do that first. Instead, over my lifetime, I have seen these things disappearing. Literally becoming more dangerous.
I know you think you're arguing in good faith, but you are a puppet of some seriously malevolent mother fuckers who will endanger children for profit and an excuse to fuck my privacy. Yours too, if you care. Don't tolerate a hand up your ass without at least a little foreplay.
I completely agree with you and yes it's a constant struggle against drivers and politicians catering to them to get anything that's even remotely pedestrian friendly.
The other person out of curiosity did ask the reasoning behind it and i can give one, even though it's from a positive perspective which isn't that accurate for the reason why those cameras have been implement. That doesn't mean that i support it, in every response iv said how those cameras have become the worst ways to control traffic, but i can't deny the beneficial effect of traffic cameras. Those do work, with a huge cost to privacy.
I've just seen too many drivers slowing down to speed limit when a map says a traffic camera is coming up. Same on intersections, it reduces how many drivers try to slip over when it's "orange"(just turned red). Similar around police (excluding the corruption argument), people start to behave better.
So imminent threat of a punishment does have a positive, even if limited, effect.