ROCHESTER, N.Y. — The Rochester City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to enter an agreement with BusPatrol, a provider of school bus safety camera services, to keep Rochester’s kids safe. The vote came during National School Bus Safety Week.

For the first time, the Rochester City School District will have technology that will take a snapshot of cars that pass by stopped school buses. According to the state, an estimated 50,000 vehicles illegally pass school buses in New York every day.

“We don’t have hundreds of officers — the man power in law enforcement to station physical officers behind hundreds of school buses. So this is a place where photo enforcement makes a lot of sense,” said Steve Randazzo, chief growth officer with BusPatrol.

BusPatrol is installed in over 11,000 school buses across New York State. Randazzo says the program’s goal is to get students on and off the bus safely — and to hold reckless drivers accountable.

With this new technology provided by BusPatrol, buses will be able to catch drivers in the act when they pass a school bus while the stop arm is out. New York legalized the use of stop arm cameras back in 2019. Now, the City of Rochester has established a local law to use them to charge penalties.

Randazzo explains where the cameras are positioned and says there’s no way around it. The cameras “get installed on the outside of a school bus and then the idea is that when a motorist passes the school bus illegally in violation of the vechicle and traffic law– when the arm is out and the red lights are flashing we can use that photo and video evidence.”

That evidence is then transmitted to the city, and the municipality can issue the registered owner of the vehicle a ticket for breaking the law. The cameras are not doing facial recognition, so the ticket goes to the registered owner, functioning more or less like a parking ticket.

The fines for being caught illegally passing a school bus are:

• $250 for the first violation
• $275 for a second violation
• $300 for a third and subsequent violation
• An additional $25 fee if you don’t respond to the fine

Randazzo says a 20 to 40 percent year-over-year reduction in violations is what’s been reported in municipalities using the cameras. over 90 percent of folks who get one violation in the mail from the BusPatrol program do not repeat offend, he added.

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