A school-bus camera program in Montgomery County, Maryland, generated 375,000 tickets and $92 million in fines, but county records showed no evidence of fewer collisions near stopped buses. That gap sits at the heart of the debate over using AI cameras to catch drivers who pass when children are boarding or getting off.
As TechSpot recently highlighted, school buses around the country now carry small AI-powered cameras aimed at drivers who ignore their fold-out stop signs. BusPatrol alone has installed its cameras on around 35,000 buses across 24 states. The goal is safer roads for pedestrians, though questions about effectiveness and privacy haven’t gone away.
Once BusPatrol’s system spots an offending driver, it reportedly sends the data to a human reviewer, who assembles an evidence package for police to look over before a ticket is mailed out.
The Montgomery County figures come from an investigation by Type Investigations and Bloomberg. County records showed no evidence of a decline in collisions near stopped school buses. The investigation also examined how the collected fines were split: between 2019 and 2024, about $40 million went to BusPatrol, compared with $18.5 million kept by the county.
AngelTrax, another bus-camera company, recently announced a partnership with Teton Stage Lines. Local News 8 reported that AngelTrax recently announced a partnership with Teton Stage Lines, an Idaho-based bus charter company. AngelTrax vice president of operations Katherine Tolar claimed that 98 percent of violators who get caught and receive a citation never repeat the behavior. “So we do know that its changing driver behavior,” she told the outlet.
Verra Mobility reported the same repeat-violation figure in August. In its account to Fox 35 Orlando, the company said its data showed that 98 percent of cited drivers don’t commit another violation. It also said citations drop by 70 percent over a school year.
Those figures are company claims, and they track citations and repeat violations, not the drop in collisions that Montgomery County’s records failed to show.
Privacy is another concern when traffic cameras meet AI surveillance, particularly in light of Flock. As far as we know, rogue cops can’t remotely tap into these bus cameras anywhere in the country the way they could with Flock.
