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…
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.
It depends on the directionality. Download a crusty old Miley Cyrus MP3 with a virus? Money goes to the RIAA. Huge mega-corp rakes their customers over the coals for years? The government collects the fine and keeps 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.
Too many roads are built in ways that encouraged speeding and make it feel comfortable.
A big part of the problem here is that speed limits are specified as the maximum speed on which the largest vehicle can safely traverse the road.
Example: Design a road where you can comfortably cruise at 35-40MPH, curves and everything, in a minivan full of kids and gear? Well too bad, that road is now 25MPH and radar-patrolled because a tractor-trailer can’t do 40MPH around one of the curves.
So you have these great, swooping roads with ridiculously low speed limits, because one trucker somewhere is a brainless dumbfuck and refuses to understand how physics works.
Interesting. Here we use the 85th percentile limit to set speed limits. Every few years the city does a speed study. By law (I think) they are supposed to set the limit at the speed 85% of drivers are at or under. If they don’t, they’re supposed to provide a justification for deviating from the rule. The idea is that people naturally drive at whatever speed they feel comfortable driving, instead of fighting it, we cut off the top 15% of speeders and set the limit there to minimize speed differential which is a big cause of crashes. We use yellow advisory plates when trucks need to slow down for a sharp curve or something.
That’s all theory. In practice we have 5 patrol deputies at any point for the entire county and I rarely ever see city cops. No one has respect for the law. Right of way and speed limits are determined by your bravado, risk tolerance, and your full-sized pickup of choice (provided you make the requisite exhaust modifications to spew thick black clouds of freedom every time you tap the throttle). We call them accidents, but crashes are frequently the result of people not exercising due care when driving. The city keeps building 6 lane 45mph roads with 11-12 foot lanes that make people want to drive 60. I hope the next generation of traffic engineers do a better job of segregating fast roads and slow streets.
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…
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.
It’s kind of insane that the fine for breaking the law goes to a company and not the government.
It depends on the directionality. Download a crusty old Miley Cyrus MP3 with a virus? Money goes to the RIAA. Huge mega-corp rakes their customers over the coals for years? The government collects the fine and keeps it.
No argument here.
Why not just have the school district/police department set up and host the cameras themselves and keep all the revenue?
Because it’s expensive.
Wait…
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
Wasn’t necessary imo
Never being in USA has worked so far.
Did… Did you not read the article?
Or even finish reading the title?
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”?
Just like I can bypass doorbell cams by not going on people’s porches?
Oh wait, that’s not true at all is 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.
A big part of the problem here is that speed limits are specified as the maximum speed on which the largest vehicle can safely traverse the road.
Example: Design a road where you can comfortably cruise at 35-40MPH, curves and everything, in a minivan full of kids and gear? Well too bad, that road is now 25MPH and radar-patrolled because a tractor-trailer can’t do 40MPH around one of the curves.
So you have these great, swooping roads with ridiculously low speed limits, because one trucker somewhere is a brainless dumbfuck and refuses to understand how physics works.
Interesting. Here we use the 85th percentile limit to set speed limits. Every few years the city does a speed study. By law (I think) they are supposed to set the limit at the speed 85% of drivers are at or under. If they don’t, they’re supposed to provide a justification for deviating from the rule. The idea is that people naturally drive at whatever speed they feel comfortable driving, instead of fighting it, we cut off the top 15% of speeders and set the limit there to minimize speed differential which is a big cause of crashes. We use yellow advisory plates when trucks need to slow down for a sharp curve or something.
That’s all theory. In practice we have 5 patrol deputies at any point for the entire county and I rarely ever see city cops. No one has respect for the law. Right of way and speed limits are determined by your bravado, risk tolerance, and your full-sized pickup of choice (provided you make the requisite exhaust modifications to spew thick black clouds of freedom every time you tap the throttle). We call them accidents, but crashes are frequently the result of people not exercising due care when driving. The city keeps building 6 lane 45mph roads with 11-12 foot lanes that make people want to drive 60. I hope the next generation of traffic engineers do a better job of segregating fast roads and slow streets.
How does one come to ‘think’ like that? You’ve caught my morbid fascination.
deleted by creator