RSI, a global provider of customized GPS-based vehicle tracking and mobile data systems, is installing a turn-key Automatic Vehicle Location system for the Baltimore school bus fleet.
The systems send data wirelessly from the vehicles to a base station, providing valuable information such as location/address, speed, time stopped, and students loaded/unloaded. Student loading and unloading is monitored and recorded using a student list with barcodes and readers. When the student boards or exits, the operator swipes the student’s barcode from a list, thereby associating that event with a specific GPS location and time. In effect, the system allows authorities or parents to know if, when, and where their children get on or off the bus. The system provides a record as well as a level of prevention in the event a special needs student gets off at the wrong stop. “The safety of our children has always been of the utmost importance to everyone,” said RSI President Jonathan Michels.
Wouldn’t the next logical stage be to tattoo a barcode on each kid — or maybe staple an RFID tag on each kid’s forehead?
This is common on Postal vehicles, transit trucks, etc. Seems to be a good safety step. I heard a while back someone saying we need to GPS our congressmen to keep tabs on them? Sounds good to me!
Guess what they also take attendance in classrooms! The bigger tracking closer to your picture is when they use fingerprint readers to buy lunch.
Truckers and there trailers have these also, with many companies.
For many reasons, including hijacking.
Gotta dump that trailer FAST.
I think it is a great idea to keep up with kids going to school and I sure don’t trust that job to the bus drivers. Every year we hear of at least one missing, hurt or killed child on the bus. And, did you hear the one about the substitute school bus driver that got lost? Oh, you don’t think that is funny? I have heard that school buses in Dallas have video monitors. Is that an invasion of privacy or a responsible act?
And then there are those kids that are in a bus teetering on the edge of a cliff and the bus driver tells the kids to stay on the bus or a moster will eat them while she goes for help and then forgets about them and ends up on the Tonight Show doing comedy.
I hate it when that happens.
They spend all this money on a GPS system and I bet the busses still don’t have seatbelts. They don’t care how many kids are hurt as long as it is efficient and trackable.