4,000 Cars Illegally Pass School Buses Over Summer Break

by Dereen Shirnekhi

As the start of the school year nears, the number of drivers caught on camera illegally blowing past school buses has grown to 12,000 — with half of the violators neither paying nor appealing their fines.

That number grew by 4,000 in the summer months, even though regular school was out of session.

With the academic year beginning, the city is tackling a backlog of more than 1,000 citations that have been appealed since March by finally beginning hearings for people seeking to contest their fines.

That’s according to Haley Simpson, the city’s transportation director, who said that those hearings are expected to begin in September.

The City of New Haven, school bus contractor First Student, and camera operator BusPatrol installed automatic-enforcement cameras on 344 city school buses earlier this year to catch cars that illegally pass stopped buses. Drivers began receiving citations on March 2 after the end of a month-long warning period.

Each citation carries a fine of $250. Citations must be appealed or paid within 14 days.

The city pays $225 per bus per month to contractor BusPatrol. There are 344 buses that have cameras. That’s a total of $77,400 per month. BusPatrol also gets a cut of $55 per paid citation.

Revenue from citations must be used to fund public safety in the city.

As of Friday, Simpson said that 12,684 citations have been issued to date. 5,630 have been paid in full, while 1,308 are awaiting appeal hearings.

Around mid June, Simpson told the Independent that 8,495 citations had been issued and 3,682 had been paid. Another 920 had been appealed and were pending hearings.

That’s an increase of 4,189 total citations issued; 1,984 citations paid; and 388 citations appealed in two months.

When asked why there had been such an increase in citations over the summer months, Simpson estimated that it was likely that the numbers provided in June were an underestimate, as the system takes a few days to update because footage is reviewed by a human to determine whether each violation is legitimate.

Simpson also noted that the cameras do still operate for summer school activities, as buses continue driving around town.

To date, 5,746 citations, nearly half, have gone unpaid and have not been appealed. (Some of those citations are likely still within their two-week grace period.)

There’s not much the city can do for unpaid citations, according to Simpson.

“Since this is governed by state statute we can’t do much to enforce or add additional penalties for outstanding citations,” Simpson said in an email to the Independent. (Read the city’s ordinance here.) “We send reminder notices/late notices after 30 days of outstanding payment.”

But for drivers who might have trouble paying for their citation in full, Simpson said that the city will work with them to establish payment plans.

“These citations carry a civil penalty. While we expect citations to be paid in full, we recognize that some individuals may not be able to do so at once,” Simpson said. “In those cases, we work with individuals to establish payment arrangements that allow them to satisfy their outstanding balance while maintaining consistent enforcement of the school bus safety program.”

Appeal hearings were originally expected to begin in early July. Simpson said that no hearings have yet taken place; they are now scheduled to begin Sept. 10.

When asked previously why the appeals process was not in place prior to the start of the bus camera program, Simpson said that because this is a new enforcement initiative, the city wanted to first see the nature and number of appeals to inform training for hearing officers.

The mayor has appointed three hearing officers: Westville resident and civic volunteer Lisa Brandes, law professor Joshua Galperin, and Asst. Corporation Counsel Earle Giovanniello.

Hearing officers cannot work for the Transportation, Traffic, and Parking Department or the police department. They will make the call whether or not to scrap the citation while TT&P plays a neutral role.

Galperin, who is an environmental law professor at Pace University in White Plains, NY, and a visiting professor at Yale Law School who lives in New Haven, said that a friend of his who works for the city had asked him if he’d be interested in the position. He said yes, both because he loves New Haven and thinks it’s important to do civic work, and because he’s interested in the question of automation and policing.

“I think that this school bus camera program is really important, but it’s a balance,” he said. He thinks concerns about cameras, privacy, and robots, like the debate playing out nationwide about Flock cameras, are valid. “At the same time, New Haven drivers are bad.”

Galperin has lived in the city for around 15 years. “It still stuns me how bad people are at driving,” he said. “I think that the bus camera program is important for creating incentives to drive more safely and therefore protecting children, but there needs to be humans in the loop and there needs to be an opportunity for recourse.”

In other words, “if someone thinks the robot got them unfairly, they need to have the opportunity to say so,” and make their case to a hearing officer.

Asked if he had ever received a citation for passing a stopped bus, he said he hadn’t. “I’ve had a red light ticket once, and it was my fault,” he said. He couldn’t remember if he had either been going too fast or hadn’t registered the yellow light in time. When he got the notice in the mail, “I said, ‘Well, I deserve that.’”