Each week “resident riskologist” Keven Moore shines the light on America’s riskiest behaviors – from unsafe driving practices to workplace stress to common home accidents. And in the process, he provides the information needed to help people play it a little safer.
Parents … imagine it’s 7 a.m. on a school day. Your child is dressed and ready, his homework is in the backpack and breakfast is complete. Just as he finishes lacing up his sneakers, you receive a signal on your cell phone that the school bus is just one minute away.
Then, as you open the door and kiss little Johnny goodbye, an all-electric, self-driving school bus pulls up to let him onboard.

This school bus of the future is still yellow, but it’s also green with environmentally friendly technology helping to reduce our carbon footprint and saving millions of dollars a year. And with driverless technology, the driver becomes a bus monitor tasked with making the ride to and from school a safer one.
Tomorrow’s school bus will use a combination of GPS, inertial navigation system (INS), lasers, radars, infrared and cameras to analyze and process information about their surroundings faster than humans. Anti-collision avoidance sensors wired to Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication will allow your child’s school bus to communicate wirelessly with other vehicles on the roadway to help prevent collisions; and more importantly determine what the best evasive measure should be if another car started coming into its own projected path.
It will also have vehicle-to-infrastructure communication V2I technology, which will allow vehicles to connect and communicate with road signs and traffic signals and provide information to the vehicle about safety issues. V2I technology will allow the school bus to receive traffic information from your community’s traffic management system to retrieve the best possible routes when traffic spikes during the morning rush hour.
This new technology will transform the way we all drive and increase automotive safety. Reports by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that by incorporating this technology it would reduce all target vehicle crashes by 81 percent, reducing the risk exposure to the students and the school district.
Futuristic school buses will also be able to monitor current road conditions due to inclement weather and make the appropriate adjustments as the weather changes. So when the vehicle’s sensors detect black ice, it can safely adjust to a more appropriate and safer speed for the current conditions.
I predict that these buses will also be equipped with child-detecting motion sensors surrounding the entire perimeter of the bus to prevent accidental rollovers. Currently according the Transportation Research Board, on average 15 school-age students are accidentally killed by being struck and run over by a school bus every year.
I predict that the futuristic school bus will also be equipped with wireless technology that automatically takes attendance the moment your Johnny boards and scans his fingerprint. Where morning announcements can be made by the principal via a flat-screen TV on the bus as they ride to school, saving valuable minutes that can be recommitted to instructional time.
Also every year there are countless incidents of preschool, elementary-aged or special-needs students that are accidentally left behind all alone on a bus once a bus route is completed, or are being dropped off at the wrong bus stop –resulting in multiple lawsuits for school districts all across the United States, sometimes reaching in the millions of dollars.
I predict that the futuristic school bus will monitor students as they depart the bus, recording the exact time and location where a student is dropped off as they rescan their fingerprint as they depart. Every student is then accounted for and all records will be maintained for risk management purposes. If Johnny hasn’t departed at his scheduled bus stop, the onboard computer will notify the bus monitor that he is sleeping on the back row.
In the name of infection control, the school bus of the future could even quickly read your child’s body temperature as he boards, to identify if he is running a temperature to help control the spread of communicable diseases such as the flu, immediately sending you the parent a text to your phone to unlock that front door because Johnny just got excused from school.
As this technology is rolled out I predict that there will be some initial hesitation and some budgetary concerns for school districts. But once school districts figure up the ROI from the future potential fuel savings and lower insurance costs, all school districts will begin to invest in this new technology so that they can pass the savings back to the bottom line to reinvest into their educational goals for the students.
It will, however, be quite some time for these technological developments to evolve, and there are still many industry concerns and logistical and liability questions to answer. But I believe we’ll see the day when we have to explain what a steering wheel was designed to do.
Be safe, my friends.
Keven Moore is director of Risk Management Services for Roeding Insurance (www.roedinginsurance.com). He has a bachelor’s degree from University of Kentucky, a master’s from Eastern Kentucky University and 25-plus years of experience in the safety and insurance profession. He lives in Lexington with his family and works out of both the Lexington and Northern Kentucky offices. Keven can be reached at kmoore@roeding.com.
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