Kyle McDonald is afraid to let his two young children play in the front yard of their home.
Too often McDonald and others in the neighbourhood have seen cars flying down Fountain Street South with blatant disregard for their surroundings, including stopped school buses that are picking up and dropping off students.
“Honestly it’s only getting worse,” McDonald said.
“It’s a battle I’ve been fighting for 10 years. I look like a lunatic standing on my front lawn screaming at cars.”
In 2021, the Waterloo Regional Police Service laid 97 school bus related charges in the region. Cambridge accounted for 25 of them.
The numbers are down in 2022 to 48 in the region and 13 in Cambridge. However, the WRPS Traffic Services Unit says the 2021 numbers are more indicative of the trends they typically see year over year.
“Five or six years ago I had cops run radar in my driveway,” McDonald said.
“It’s the nature of the street, people fly down here. I’ll give nasty looks and they slow down.”
Sevtlana Taran is McDonald’s neighbour and echoes his frustration.
Taran says it’s not uncommon to see people failing to obey the stop signs and flashing lights of the school bus multiple times per week.
“People are always rushing through our street, we feel like it’s a highway sometimes,” Taran said.
“Last week, I was working from home a couple days and I saw it twice. I’m not even looking for it, that’s just what I happen to see.”
The lack of care around school buses is very concerning says Arun Chandra, the safety and technology supervisor for Student Transportation Services of Waterloo Region.
“It has been and continues to be an alarming issue,” Chandra said.
“Children are most vulnerable outside the school bus and we have a duty to be more cognizant about their safety and obeying the laws around school buses to keep them safe.”
Student Transportation Services of Waterloo Region is always looking at ways to improve their safety measures.
Recent upgrades include the addition of amber to red light system that will alert traffic the bus is about to stop.
They’ve also altered their routing methods to increase door side stops for students, which limits the amount of times students need to cross the road to get on the bus.
Updates to the First Rider program and continual development of new programs like the School Bus Safety Training aim to create awareness about school bus safety.
Seat belts are also being piloted.
From the region’s perspective, staff will be providing an update on school bus safety and other automated enforcement initiatives to Regional Council in the first half of 2023.
Failing to stop at a school bus stop sign comes at a significant cost to the offender.
Fines range from $400 to $2,000 and six demerit points for a first offence. If someone is caught a second time in five years it can lead to a fine of $1,000 to $4,000 and six demerit points. Offenders could also face up to six months in jail.
McDonald hopes people get the message before it’s too late and a tragedy strikes.
“Only now people are starting to pay attention to it,” he said.
“It’s been a problem for a long, long time.”
