The Town of Bracebridge wants to see cameras installed on the stop arms of all school buses by the start of the 2023-24 school year.
On Tuesday, the Bracebridge general committee voted to petition the provincial government to require all school buses to have stop arm cameras installed and paid for by the province for the start of the 2023-2024 school year; and to underwrite the costs of implementation and ongoing annual costs for administrative monetary penalties in small and rural municipalities.
The motion was brought forward by Coun. Tatiana Sutherland, who said she has witnessed first-hand cars blowing past the activated stop arm. Sutherland said this has resulted in several precarious situations and in some instances, parents have taken it upon themselves to try and track down the identity of the drivers in violation.
Council heard that almost 824,000 students travel in about 16,000 school vehicles every school day in Ontario and, according to the Ministry of Transportation’s statistics, the rate of vehicles failing to stop for a stopped school bus is over 30,000 times every day.
In 2017, the province passed the Safer School Zones Act in 2017 which authorized the use of Automated School Bus Stop Arm Camera Systems to detect incidents where vehicles failed to stop when the school bus had the stop arm extended.
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