We're partnering with Conduent Transportation to make school buses safer for our most important road users: children

Today we announced our new partnership with Conduent Transportation to develop and deliver an automated technology solution that will help school districts enforce traffic rules prohibiting drivers from illegally passing stopped school buses.

Automated bus lane enforcement is just the beginning of what our patented AIoT platform and proprietary perception hardware can accomplish. Our next mission? Making the trip to and from school safer for children.

This week, we’re pleased to announce that we’re partnering with Conduent Transportation – a global provider of smart mobility technology solutions – to develop and deliver an automated technology platform designed to protect children who ride on school buses. The solution can be adopted by school districts to help make communities safer through increased enforcement of traffic laws intended to keep children safe.

Passing a school bus with its stop arm extended is illegal in every U.S. state. Yet each and every school day, almost 100,000 drivers do so, putting children’s lives at risk. According to a 2019 survey of approximately 27% of school bus drivers in the U.S., 95,319 vehicles illegally passed school buses in a single day – contributing to at least 17 million stop arm violations per year. Even this number is only a fraction of annual violations, as not all school bus drivers participated in the survey.

The staggering number of illegal school bus passes leads directly to student deaths and injuries. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), on average seven school-age children were killed while crossing the street to or from school buses each year from 2009 to 2018 – a number increasing as child pedestrian fatalities skyrocket across the country. In just a six-day period in 2018, six students were killed and eight students and two adults were injured by vehicles illegally passing school buses or crashing into people as they waited to board.

Our partnership with Conduent will leverage Hayden AI’s expertise in artificial intelligence and computer vision to deploy mobile cameras mounted on bus exteriors that activate when bus lights flash and the stop arm extends. The solution will detect and capture evidence packages of drivers violating the stop arm by illegally passing the bus. Much like our automated bus lane enforcement platform deployed by New York’s MTA, the license plate details and a video clip of the violation are quickly sent via a secure cloud connection to law enforcement for evaluation.

As school districts and law enforcement agencies work to make the trip to and from school safer for children, automated school bus stop arm technology is an important tool to increase driver compliance with laws requiring them to stop when the bus is stopped. (You can read more about this issue and how automated traffic enforcement can fix it in our white paper.)