In June 2023, the Montgomery County Policing Advisory Commission issued a report entitled “PAC Findings and Recommendations on MCPD Traffic Enforcement” that stated:
“The effectiveness of traffic enforcement must be measured against its impact on traffic accidents. That is the only appropriate metric for measuring effectiveness.”
The county’s school bus stop-light ticketing program can therefore be evaluated by answering a simple question using this trusted metric: Have there been fewer collisions between passing vehicles and student pedestrians near school buses since the county’s school bus camera enforcement program went into effect in 2016 when compared to the five years before it was implemented? The answer is a definite “no.”
On July 23, 2019, the retiring inspector general of Montgomery County, Edward L. Blansitt III, submitted his “Final Advisory Memorandum, Memorandum of Understanding Regarding the School Bus Safety Camera Program.” Mr. Blansitt provided this key finding regarding school bus-related pedestrian safety in the county:
“We contacted both [the Montgomery County police department] and the Maryland State Police and requested data on school bus stop light violations resulting in pedestrian collisions in Montgomery County; neither agency could locate any record of such a collision in Montgomery County for at least the past eight years.”
The “past eight years” included 2011 to 2019.
A search of online media stories found reports of two school bus-related pedestrian collisions involving passing vehicles in 2019 and one in 2022. Two resulted in unspecified injuries. One of the three was confirmed to have involved a driver disobeying the stop lights of a school bus. For the other two, there was no confirmation of a stop-light violation. These three pedestrian collisions all occurred years after the school bus camera program had become fully operational.
It is therefore correct to state that collisions between school bus-riding student pedestrians and passing vehicles appeared to increase in the county after the program was established — compared to the five years prior to the program’s implementation, when there were none. Also, there have been five media-reported pedestrian accidents caused by school buses in the county since 2013, which included the deaths of two older adults and one 9-year old student.
However, according to the county police department (in three editions of the “School Bus Monitoring System and Stop Safety Review” for fiscal years 2022, 2023 and 2024), the county’s school bus camera ticketing program, operated by the politically well-connected camera contractor BusPatrol, issued 325,804 citations resulting in $79,474,625 in fines from fiscal year 2017 through fiscal year 2024 for school bus stop-light infractions — all of which supposedly endangered school kids. According to Bethesda Magazine, 60% of each $250 citation goes to BusPatrol and 40% goes to the county’s general fund.
The police department has not collected any data showing evidence that even one of the hundreds of thousands of school bus camera citations issued since 2016 documented a collision. If tickets had actually involved dangerous driving, the cameras would have depicted hundreds of collisions, with multiple student injuries and even fatalities. That obviously didn’t happen. This means that the program, by design, issues more than 50,000 tickets per year for minor, harmless technical infractions for the sole purpose of generating revenue via “taxation by citation” at $250 a pop. The program is on track to having assessed $100 million in “gotcha” tickets in less than 10 years by fiscal year 2026.
Montgomery County school bus drivers have done an excellent job of transporting children safely for decades, and they did so well before the use of school bus stop-light camera ticketing. It is time for the County Council to hold public hearings and fully investigate this ineffective, unfair and expensive ticketing program.
Tom Drischler of Rockville is a past board chair of the International Association of Transportation Regulators (IATR), and a retired Los Angeles City taxicab administrator.
