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Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

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Re: Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

#81

Post by cucumber3732842 »

vel0city wrote: post #70
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"City" and "urban" are not the same thing and you are all up and down these comments playing the overlap in colonial usage of those terms to essentially mislead people. The census designation of rural is very stringent and you basically need more cows than people to meet it. That's where this "80% of the population is urban" stat you love to vomit up comes through. Buuut, of that 80%, most do not live in any sort of…

> The census designation of rural is very stringent and you basically need more cows than people to meet it. Not true. The census actually doesn't really bother to define rural other than "not urban". So then it comes down to what the urban definition is. The urban definition is: > To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,000 housing units or have a populat…

>Not true. The census actually doesn't really bother to define rural other than "not urban". So then it comes down to what the urban definition is. The urban definition is: 2k houses/5k people

Right, and when you look at the size of these areas thats a really low bar

>What do you mean about "the colonial sense"?

Colloquial. Autocorrect

>Its called a city on paper because it is a city.

Not necessarily. The entire country is absolutely littered with small towns of say 40k population or less that are cities for administrative reasons either because they're incorporated that way or some other reason like being locally more important 100yr ago. Many of these "cities" are tens of thousands of people smaller, and way less dense, than bedroom community suburbs around major cities that are incorperated as towns and nobody would call a city.

Re: Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

#82

Post by lenerdenator »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #53
lenerdenator wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until you try putting a Costco-sized bulk package of something on a bike.

Interesting how both responses zoomed in on the one part of the comment that wasn't a problem for me and asserted that it was the problem. Replace Costco with "some place I like to go" if that is less distracting.

Well, it's very much a part of the problem.

The entire nature of commerce in much of the US is based around the automobile. You are expected to buy things in quantities that are best transported by a car. You are going to a place that is stocked by the truckload because it is placed near a road or highway.

The money is made because of the road network. That's why governments build highways and roads: to enable commerce that they then tax. It's more efficient for a lot of commercial purposes if you have commerce occur at the scale of a vehicle than it is if it occurs at the scale of a person.

If you want to go to a park or some other place "I like to go", sure, it's great to have those within walking distance, but that's not going to be enough to motivate political and economic will to scrap trillions of dollars in investment in infrastructure based on the automobile. It just isn't.

Re: Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

#83

Post by olyjohn »

lenerdenator wrote: post #39
hombre_fatal wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those people don't even have the option, so what do you mean they prefer to not walk/bike? How pleasant walking/biking will be is linked to density, reduced distance to amenities, and infrastructure, things almost no US cities have. I live blocks from Costco in one of those cities but the option is either get on my bike and share the four-lane road with aggressive drivers in massive trucks/SUVs or use a tiny side…

Wait until you try putting a Costco-sized bulk package of something on a bike.

You don't need to buy Costco sized bulk anything if you don't have to spend 4 hours round trip to get in and out of that place.

Re: Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

#84

Post by rpdillon »

jeffbee wrote: post #62
nayuki wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but the article is complaining about other innocent people that might get caught in the surveillance dragnet.

That's too generous. It is a propaganda piece by the driver lobby using a hypothetical, fabricated privacy argument to further the central driver lobby goal of total impunity.

So you're in favor of turning the enforcement mechanism for red lights into an indiscriminate license plate reader?

Re: Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

#85

Post by jeffbee »

rpdillon wrote: post #84
jeffbee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's too generous. It is a propaganda piece by the driver lobby using a hypothetical, fabricated privacy argument to further the central driver lobby goal of total impunity.

So you're in favor of turning the enforcement mechanism for red lights into an indiscriminate license plate reader?

Yes, I am 100% in favor of that.

Re: Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

#86

Post by rpdillon »

jeffbee wrote: post #65
garyfirestorm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just implant the AirTag on my body and share it with everyone ffs

99.99% of Americans have freely chosen to do this exact thing, so any concerns about this must be imaginary.

99% of Americans have an implanted airtag? What?

Re: Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

#87

Post by olyjohn »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #20

Yes, this is concerning. But there's also the other side. Some of the little miscreants who shared my bus ride were positively nasty. Some surveillance would have helped a number of people avoid bullying.

How about we don't rely on cameras to keep people from being assholes? That's not a fix to the problem, that just leads to smarter assholes.

Re: Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

#88

Post by bokohut »

I chaperoned a 7th grade field trip at the beginning of June 2026 and I have not been on a school bus for many years. As a serial technologist entrepreneur and technology platform creator this school bus was a mecca of tracking technology and I was taking photos from this limited time I was given riding in this mobile edge data collection vehicle which originally was only used to move kids to and from school. The bus had 11 cameras visible that I could see located on the inside and outside. Mounted on the ceiling above and to the left of the drivers head was a small locked mini rack that I assume was the consolidation point of all wires to a Digital Video Recorder. I could not determine, nor was informed, if this system is remotely accessible but it must be given the worlds appetite for "connected" which many believe means 'easy'.

I spoke to the bus driver and she informed me that she loves the cameras and that they have been used to suspend kids thus proving her innocents and have also been used by law enforcement 'looking' for things. She also told me of a unique case where a kid placed spikes under a bus tire and this kid got more than a suspension from his actions that the video recorded.

Interesting times where everything is being recorded however the context of a situation can obviously still be missing from any recorded evidence. Seems like everyone's privacy is just "flocked". ;)

Re: Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

#89

Post by cucumber3732842 »

vel0city wrote: post #48
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) it doesn't actually happen that often b) when it does it's usually some stupid situation where robotic adherence to the lights is in poor taste (like a bus picking up or discharging an entire team on a right side curb, or a divided median) albeit legally mandated. c) School bus drivers already radio in plate numbers of anyone who does it in poor taste and the buses mostly already have dashcams so this isn't really…

a) it happens all the time Source: actual statistics instead of just second hand reports from a single bus driver. https://www.ghsa.org/resource-hub/school-bus-safety-action-p...

39mil/yr (coming from the people who want to play up the problem) is less than half a percent of trips. Which is pretty amazing to me considering that a trip is an hour or so of stop and go on surface roads. I assume a huge fraction of that is just from opposing traffic that isn't paying attention or behaving conservatively enough to be in a position to be stopped as soon as it's red.

Seriously, this isn't a problem. We're talking a small amount of petty unlawful behavior that almost certainly has a near zero conversion ratio to actual harm to anybody. That's not a good reason to crank the 1984 to 11 and anyone that says it is is a bad person and I'll die on that hill.

Re: Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

#90

Post by iamnothere »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #64
SoftTalker wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that if you want to bike to get things you need, you have to go to places that are on more local scale. A place like Costco can only exist with the support of a large amount of car infrastructure. So if you want to go there that's what you have to deal with.

Costco happens to have a couple products I want that I used to bring back by bike until I decided it wasn't worth it unless I was already walking back from the cafe near it. Swap Costco out with any place I might want to go, and my point doesn't change because whether I can carry a bag of six bagels or eat a pizza in their food court isn't up for debate. You got one-shot by a triviality. The argument is not whether C…

People go to Costco because they want to make fewer trips in general. They load up their giant SUVs with the kids and the dogs, then with all their groceries and clothing and pool floats and other merchandise, and they bring it back to their giant house that has room for storing all this extra crap.

In my experience, people who live this way don’t have a problem with any of it.

You can’t just “undo” one piece of this without undoing everything else about our society. And that’s just not likely to happen in a democracy, as annoying as that may be.

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