On an average day, Utah’s drivers run through 1,500 school bus stop signs.
That’s hard to imagine, but it’s true. When those red, flashing stop signs swing out on a child’s school bus, thousands of people in our state storm on through, completely ignoring the warning that, at any second, somebody’s child could step in front of their car.
It’s a horrible thing to do, but here in Utah, the fine for running a school bus stop sign, as a first offense, is only $100. And most of that 1,500 people that run those signs each day just never get caught.
And because of that, it keeps happening, year after year. People blast past stop signs, putting the lives of children in extreme jeopardy, and aren’t suffering consequences for it.
That’s absurd, because it would be so easy to put an end to this.
Our school buses are equipped with cameras that can – and do – capture cars running the school bus stop arms. All we’d have to do is put them to use and they could be our best tool for making sure our kids make it home alive.
A family in Rochester, Indiana, just two weeks ago, lost three of their children in a blink of an eye.
Their school bus’s stop sign was out, the red lights flashing out a warning that kids were trying to make their way across the road, when a pickup truck flew past the bus and crashed right into the kids.
That was all it took. One person didn’t think she had time to stop, and because of that, a family lost their nine-year-old girl and their twin six-year-old boys.
Here in Utah, we run the risk of seeing a tragedy just like that one every day.
Our schools ran an experiment two years ago. For one day, on Nov. 9, 2016, bus drivers kept a tally of how many people they saw running school bus stop signs. By the time the day was over, they’d caught 1,500 people.
The worst offenders were in Central Salt Lake County. The bus drivers in our Granite School District caught 535 people running through stop signs in just one day.
Every car that rushes past one of those signs puts a child’s life in jeopardy. Those drivers are taking a roll on the dice every time they do it, and they do it hundreds of times a day. And every time the wrong number comes up, a child is going to die.
More to the story It’s time to crack down on people who run school bus stop signs
Drivers running school bus stop signs isn’t just a Utah problem, it’s nation-wide. A lot of solutions have been suggested, including one group floating a petition to make running a stop sign a federal crime with a $5,000 fee.
We talked about that idea on KSL Newsradio’s Dave & Dujanovic, but my co-host, Dave Noriega, didn’t like the idea. He says this is an issue best left to the states.
If you missed the show live, you can still catch what he had to say about it on the Dave & Dujanovic podcast.
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