It’s kind of insane that the fine for breaking the law goes to a company and not the government.

Why not just have the school district/police department set up and host the cameras themselves and keep all the revenue?

Sorry, that was meant to be a joke reply to the original comment. I'll add a "/s" to it

Never being in USA has worked so far.

To be fair, people should definitely get fines for passing school buses. I'm more mad at the state for being different than the rest of the country and including divided highways in their school bus law.

“Highway” means a lot of things depending on the context. Sometimes it’s an interstate system with on and off ramps, but it also refers to a non-residential road (though in western New York, I’ve seen houses with driveways that connect with I-84, so who the fuck knows what the deal there is).

For the purposes of stopping for buses/emergency vehicles, a divided highway is any nonresidential road with a raised median such that a car is unable to turn around at any given place. At least in my state.

The only "highway" in the US where you're absolutely not allowed to stop (under normal circumstances) is a "controlled-access highway". The majority of which is the US Interstate system. Some state highways are controlled-access as well.

But I feel it's important to clarify: School buses do not stop to pick up children on those sort of roads. That would be insane.

Not sure where you live, but here's the law for Utah (where I live):

(3) The operator of a vehicle need not stop upon meeting or passing a school bus displaying alternating flashing red light signals if the school bus is traveling in the opposite direction when:

• a) traveling on a divided highway;
• b) the bus is stopped at an intersection or other place controlled by a traffic-control signal or by a peace officer; or
• c) on a highway of five or more lanes, which may include a left-turn lane or two-way left turn lane.

Note how it only specifies driving in the opposite direction of the bus.

Source: https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title41/Chapter6a/41-6a-S1302.html

They recently started doing a lot more digital surveillance/enforcement around here. PD and FD now have drones. My buddy lives by the fire station and we saw it take off and land a few times when we were having a BBQ the other day. Parts of the state now use photo radar on the freeway and it's coming to the rest of the state soon. We also have toll lanes and red light cameras. Flock has a presence, but I'm not sure how widespread. I've been riding my bikes because at least nobody bugs me on the trails apart from the occasional raccoon or flock of geese. I think it's a real privacy concern and we need to slow down before we let this tech replace the current ways of doing things.

I do see the sentiment against enforcement, but that absolutely extends to Officer Clanker. I think we should shift to enforcement by design. Too many roads are built in ways that encouraged speeding and make it feel comfortable. If you put rumbly bricks in school zones, no one will miss a sign.

It would be kinda unfeasible for the bus driver to start writing down each cars license plate that passes by it when the bus has stopped.

Except that's a rare thing to happen because it's a serious crime. Plus there's other people in the bus. When I was in school we were supposed to help take notes to identify any cars that passed when they weren't supposed to

The entire concept of laws is insane delusional anti-materialism.

I'm not going to spend time on the inequities of punishment, the inefficacy of punishment (we're still punishing people for murder! Tons of them! Every year! Can you name a culture where its generally legal? I fucking can't!), the necessary selection and injustice of enforcement when trying to impose an often complex abstract ideal on reality through brute violence which is itself usually contradictory, the history of law as excuse, the inherent injustice of violence, or the problem brought up in this thread of variance between jurisdictions of law being used to exploit. Those are all issues that require volumes to fully understand or you've already picked a side on and its not worth arguing.

I'm just going to point out that if the goal was preventing bad thing, we would focus on training education infrastructure and constantly refined best practices to help us achieve the desired (lack of) result. That is what works. We know that's what works, because in the places where there's no power over others to be gained, or where the result is the most important to the powerful, that's what we've done for over a century, arguably for millennia, across every border and language and nearly every religion. It is in fact the foundation of modern safety, infields as diverse as architecture and medicine, where procedures and design conventions are optimized to reduce room for error without reducing the agency of practitioners. Things like hoses for different parts of general anesthesia being different sizes and the switches being linked in an appropriate gear ratio, doctors signing areas to be operated on before a surgery, or railings being built over long falls anywhere a person the system cares about might ever stand.

If people –especially kids– getting where they're going –especially school– safely and quickly were the priority, we would be building trains and getting cars off the use, with constant robust well maintained professional busses as a bridge to get us there. We don't do that. We build more highways and more cars to the exclusion of all that.

The idea that anyone thinks laws are a good tool for avoiding bad outcomes is endlessly frustrating. They're not in the top ten in use today, and that's not even what they're fucking for. That's like arguing I should use a floppy silicone dildo to put a screw into a hole while we're standing in the middle of a fully stocked hardware lending library. It was funny the first few times; now I just want to scream.