School buses are going to look a bit different when they hit the road for the new school year on Sept. 6.
Effective July 1 of this year, Ontario is requiring school buses manufactured after January 2005 to operate an eight-lamp amber-red warning system.
Buses will also display signage at the rear of the vehicles that reads “do not pass when red lights flashing.”
Renée Boucher, executive director of the Sudbury Student Services Consortium, said the amber lights will flash, warning drivers that the school bus is about to stop.
When the red lights and stop sign are activated on the school bus, drivers on both sides of the roadway are expected to stop, unless it’s a roadway separated by a median (in that case, only the vehicles coming from behind the bus must stop).
Boucher said Ontario is the last jurisdiction in Canada to adopt this system.
“Hopefully people are going to be paying a little bit more attention,” she said.
It is illegal to fail to stop for a stopped school bus that has its red lights flashing. If you don’t stop, you can be fined $400 to $2,000 and receive six demerit points for a first offence.
If you are convicted a second time within five years, the penalty is a fine of $1,000 to $4,000 and six demerit points. You could also go to jail for up to six months.
In Ontario, school bus drivers and other witnesses can report vehicles that have illegally passed a school bus.
Unfortunately, some drivers continue to blow past school buses with their red lights flashing, said Boucher.
“On a regular basis we have people from the public calling the consortium providing us with information on cars that went by our stoplights and our flashing lights,” she said.
Through a partnership with Greater Sudbury Police, seven local school buses have been equipped with stop arm cameras to catch drivers who engage in this behaviour.
“If we do have video of a car going through the stop arm, we will be providing that information to the police,” Boucher said.
