The Misuse And Underuse Of Video Cameras

Taking a break from the political, military and economic chaos dominating Today’s news and our country, I thought it would be helpful to change the subject and catch our breath.  So this article will address a theme that continues to pop up more and more in the lawsuits on which I work, as an expert witness, in various modes of public transportation: The use of video cameras as part of the industry’s monitoring efforts – the industry’s weakest link.

Origins and Early Developments

When I directed the USDOT’s first nationwide examination of special transportation services for elderly and disabled persons from 1978 to 1980 (Volumes I and II of this project were published by USDOT in 1981: Special Paratransit Services for Elderly and Handicapped Persons: Operational Experiences [Volume I] and Special Paratransit Services for Elderly and Handicapped Persons: Decision Manual for System Design [Volume II], my four-person team observed not a single camera in the scores of vehicles we examined and/or in which we rode in 30 systems in 18 cities. The absence of such technology was understandable: The first “camcorder” released to consumers, by JVC and Sony, did not appear until 1982, relying on video cassettes to capture, store and play the data.  

I am not certain when the first units emerged in public transportation. But in my line of work, as well as a trade show junkie who used to read about 15 transportation magazines every month (I still maintain a library of issues in most fields dating back to the start of this Century), I likely began noticing them earlier than most members of the industry, although I did not employ them in any of my vehicles: During the decade I directed the operations of my own 70-vehicle paratransit system from 1982 to 1992, the thought of installing video cameras never crossed my mind. Part of this disinterest stemmed from my sparse interest in photography of any kind throughout my life (not a failure to appreciate it, but rather, being involved in too many other things). But part of this disinterest also stemmed from the mastery of monitoring transportation services I developed over my career – particularly what I learned from my directing the USDOT study noted above. Among other things, for example, I am certain that I personally reviewed more than 200,000 drivers’ logs during my decade in operations. And with certain freedoms I carved out in contract negotiations with the corrupt and indifferent public agency for which I worked, I enjoyed a freedom to operate as close to a perfect system as anyone was likely allowed to in those days. For example, we had the freedom to assign an attendant or “bus monitor” to about a third of all our vehicles – actually a sensible approach and a justifiable expenditure of tax dollars since every one of our 1100 passengers was developmentally disabled, and a large segment of them were also physically disabled. Petit mal seizures were a common everyday occurrence on at least a few vehicles, and grand mal seizures occurred occasionally. In contrast, the behavior of our passengers (most were adults) was stellar when compared to the often wild and chaotic behavior of general education schoolbus students, even today – even with video cameras installed on a large percentage of schoolbuses for the past two decades.

In sharp contrast to the monitoring goals of most public transportation modes today, my interest lay not so much in monitoring the passengers as it did in monitoring the conduct and performance of our drivers and attendants. This obsession – again, without the help of any video cameras yet intense and diverse monitoring efforts -- translated into a single injury-accident in an estimated 29 million miles of travel, when a driver fell asleep at the wheel, cruised through a “T” intersection at roughly 50 mph and crashed headlong into a large tree. (The single passenger injured was secured in a lapbelt -- in a side-facing seat.¹ The vehicle’s collision with the tree snapped this side-facing seated passenger’s spine in half. To visualize this, think about the ease of touching one’s toes. Now think about the fact that other than the best of ballerinas, gymnasts and acrobats, few others can remotely bend over sideways and touch the ground.

As a digression from the main point of this article, I have been a fervent advocate against lapbelts and side-facing seats since then, and wrote about them often (see “The Case for Forward-Facing Seats” (see https://transalt.com/article/the-case-for-forward-facing-seats/], with Dr. Anil Khadilkar) in National Bus Trader, April, 2007). I would like to think my many presentations and articles on this subject helped lead to the forward-facing fold-down/flip-up seats one finds, above wheelchair securement positions, in most paratransit vehicles today, instead of the side-facing seats one still finds on many transit buses. And I would like to think my articles about Sleep Apnea (see https://transalt.com/article/the-case-for-mandatory-sleep-apnea-testing-part-1-an-overview/ and https://transalt.com/article/the-case-for-mandatory-sleep-apnea-testing-part-2-the-weaknesses-of-screening/), another pair of articles about bio-sensitive driver assignment (see https://transalt.com/article/bio-sensitive-driver-assignment-part-i/ and https://transalt.com/article/bio-sensitive-driver-assignment-part-ii/), and a quintet of articles about a term I coined as “bus lag” (see https://transalt.com/article/bus-lag-part-1-non-driving-off-duty-and-awake-the-whole-time-on-hos-requirements/; https://transalt.com/article/bus-lag-part-2-on-duty-driving-and-sound-asleep-the-limits-of-hos-requirements/; https://transalt.com/article/bus-lag-part-3-the-invisible-log/;  https://transalt.com/article/bus-lag-part-4-the-invisible-log-redux-logs-black-boxes-and-spoliation/; https://transalt.com/article/bus-lag-part-5-skipping-the-in-between/) – all nine of which were published by National Bus Trader – had something to do with the recent requirement for electronic driver’s logs (EEOCs) as well as the rarity of catastrophic motorcoach accidents, despite our lack of regulations prohibiting shift inversion (which has been illegal in Canada, Australia and the European Union for decades). More realistically, I may just be dreaming, and my contributions were minimal, if even noticed.

Video Cameras: Origins and Expansion by Mode

I doubt anyone could find out for sure, but I will speculate that video cameras first  emerged, in the public transportation field, in three modes: pupil transportation (i.e., general education and special needs schoolbus service), paratransit and fixed route transit. In contrast, even today, they are less common in motorcoaches, limousines and taxis, and have been installed in Transportation Network Companies’ vehicles (e.g., Uber and Lyft) only as a regulatory requirement in a few states. Their existence in passenger rail service remains sporadic: Many train cars contain none, stairways to the upper decks of double decker cars almost never have any cameras (even while passengers on the upper deck  who need to alight are asked to descend these steps while the trains are braking into the stations), I have never noticed one in any “handicapped-accessible” rail car I have ever examined, and even surveillance cameras are rare on station platforms.

As far as I can tell, the first such cameras were introduced by a San Diego-based company named Drive Cam. And its initial camera was mounted on the inside of the windshield, above or behind the interior, rear-view mirror, to capture footage of events that occurred in front of the vehicle – like the driver tailgating vehicles in front, vehicles “cutting the off,” and other safety-risk-heavy events (e.g., a pedestrian running into the roadway). I first encountered my first Drive Cam in a lawsuit around the turn of the 21st Century in – no surprise – an incident in San Diego.

Around the same time, or possibly slightly earlier, vehicle cameras were installed inside the passenger compartments of schoolbuses and transit buses. Often – at least originally – there were three or four cameras, the first viewing objects in front of the vehicle (as numerous manufacturers emulated the Drive Cams), the second viewing the front stepwell, the third viewing the passenger compartment (the camera lens was usually mounted on the “header,” above the interior, rear-view mirror), and a fourth to capture a view of the driver’s profile (right or left side of his or her head) – although some stepwell-oriented cameras mounted high to the left of the driver’s head capture the driver’s head movement – particularly useful in monitoring his or her use of mirrors, and particularly whether or not the driver “cleared the curb-side mirrors” before and during his or her pull-out from the stop. Yet the purpose of the some of the positioning in these  cameras in both these modes was mostly to view indiscretions of the passengers – not to monitor driver or attendant performance:

• In schoolbuses, the cameras are usually “pulled” only in response to a driver’s complaint about some (or several) passenger’s (or passengers’) behavior. The footage is given to some disciplinarian (commonly the Vice Principal), the student’s parents are summoned to the school, and the student is extricated from his or her class and brought into the meeting. When the complaint about the student is conveyed to his or her parents, the usual response is something like, “My little angel would never do anything like this!” Then the parents are shown the video. These meetings usually end short afterwards.
  
  Because of these meetings, the expenditure of taxpayers’ money on video cameras is well-justified, as wild student behavior often poses a serious distraction to the driver, and is occasionally responsible for a serious collision -- including the driver not observing a student crossing in front of the bus, and not observing this movement, mowing that student down (see crossingaccidents.com).


• In transit service, video footage is most commonly used to refute false claims about incidents (often onboard slips and falls) – stunts of insurance fraud.

To someone involved mostly in the safety business, as I am these days, I am constantly frustrated by various agency’s or company’s reluctance to regularly or periodically “pull” videos to examine the conduct and performance  of the driver – and in paratransit service, the errors and omissions committed by an attendant or bus monitor. After an incident where a disabled student is not properly monitored (seemingly far more common in paratransit or special needs schoolbus service), and often runs out of air (and dies from brain damage) because of such neglect, the civil suits in which I am commonly involved are often first preceded by a criminal case against the attendant, occasionally a nurse on board, or more commonly, the driver – who, under many State’s laws and the clear industry standard -- is the “Captain of the Ship,” and generally responsible for ensuring that other members of his or her crew are performing according to “industry standards” – even where there may be no regulatory violations involved. Those who commit these failures, under the driver’s supervision, are mostly “bus monitors” or attendants (sometimes referred to as aides).

Expanded Usages of Video Cameras

As time goes by, I find more and more large vehicles (in particular) equipped with more and more cameras. I have found as many as eight to 10 on many transit buses, and 12 on one double decker bus I examined. These usually include the first four views noted above, but have been expanded to provide views of the danger zones on both sides of the vehicles’ exterior, a view of objects directly in front of the vehicle’s front bumper, and even videos of things behind the bus (for example, capturing the rear-ending of the vehicle by a fellow-vehicle). Plus some cameras are mounted over wheelchair securement areas, at the rear of the passenger compartment (viewing passenger and objects from the rear) or even 360-degree profile cameras (first introduced by a manufacturer named Tiger Mirrors, and later offered by other manufacturers [mostly mirror manufacturers] like Roscoe.

What I rarely find – the focus of this article – is the practice of regularly-scheduled “pulling” of the cameras and an examination of their footage to evaluate the behavior of the drivers and attendants.

Finally – after decades of frustration about the thousands of school students mowed down by vehicles passing schoolbuses while they are loading or unloading (and their red flashers are blazing away, with stop arms swung out from the street side (i.e., left side) of the bus – schoolbus agencies and companies have began to mount cameras on the street side of the bus, below the driver’s window, with the camera’s lens pointing forward to capture the license plate (and overall image of the vehicle) that passed by the bus during its loading or unloading. This is a dramatically more effective use of cameras than most others as it focuses on prevention rather than cure: The passing motorist need not mow down a student to receive a ticket (requiring a heavy fine) in his or her mailbox. And a second offense can mean the suspension of the driver’s license! For a brief period, in one state, the governor suspended this motorist’s license indefinitely after a first offense.

As these cameras were mounted more and more often on schoolbuses, the weak link has been enforcement. In one lawsuit I recall doing several years ago, the school district sent in video evidence it captured of a “pass by,” and then received a notice from the Chief of Police that his department could not do anything about it since no officer was there, at the time the video was taken, to observe the pass-by personally. For all I know, this position may still be the formal policy of some police departments. However, as time passed, and video evidence became more and more common in lawsuits, such evidence has evolved to become more acceptable by courts, and thus, more meaningful and convincing, and the practice of issuing tickets based on video footage has expanded. One trend that contributed to this has practice has been the use, in many large cities, of mounting cameras in heavily-trafficked downtown areas to capture both moving violations – including speeding and passing through red lights – as well as parking violations. Plus the automation of toll booth collections (typically at bridges and tunnels, where EZ Pass monopolies have replaced live Earthlings positioned inside the toll booths) has facilitated the issuance of tickets, and the imposition of fines, based on the photographs taken by robots, where such enforcement was rarely performed by their human counterparts, even a few years before the robots took over.

Video cameras appear to be occur the least often on motorcoaches. But this factor is largely because they are less needed on such vehicles: The most common motorcoach incidents that cross my path, as an expert witness, have been elderly and/or disabled-and-elderly passengers falling down the stepwells (when the coach was obviously not moving). But these incidents are not frequent in charter or tour services, and some intercity services (mostly those operated by contractors), since the industry standard in these sectors of the industry is for drivers to stand at the base of the stepwell and assist or spot passengers ascending and descending the lower step and, when necessary (particularly as a spotting matter, or when assisting a disabled or extremely elderly person up or down the stepwell), physically accompanying, and often physically assisting, these individuals on and off the coach.

While few of the heavily-cushioned seats on motorcoaches are “compartmentalized” the same way schoolbus seats must be, a few seating manufacturers (beginning with Freedman seating, in 1995) offer genuine compartmentalized seats for motorcoaches, and while those coaches installing them are few and far between), the closely-spaced, padded seats of motorcoaches (plus all new coaches manufactured since 2001 must contain three-point occupant restraint systems) add to their safety. And unlike transit buses which, with the same pneumatic suspension systems, allow standees, motorcoaches do not. For mostly these reasons, injury-related incidents on motorcoaches are rare, and the need for video cameras less important.

The only exception to this rarity of incidents are the occasional catastrophic incident where a motorcoach often rolls over. But these incidents usually reflect the unusual hours that motorcoach drivers often operate (many night runs which allow passenger to sleep on board, skip the otherwise boring, long trips and avoid paying for a hotel) combined with the lax regulatory environment that permits drivers to begin shifts whenever their bosses ask them to (or whenever they choose to in union environments where drivers, rather than management, chooses the shifts) – instead of prohibiting shifts that begin three hours (at most) earlier or later than the one the operated the shift before – producing what is commonly known as “shift inversion” (and which results in what I have coined as “bus-lag”), conditions illegal in Canada, Australia and the European Union (and perhaps in other parts of the World with which I am less familiar). Because such incidents are so rare, video cameras are, again, rare on motorcoaches, whose passengers are rarely involved in the types of incidents common to passengers in other modes of public transportation.

Safety in Hiding

Superficially, one would not think of a video camera as a safety device. In contrast, it is among the most important safety devices a public transit vehicle can have. That is because the Achilles Heel in U.S. public transportation is monitoring. When manufacturers, regulatory agencies, drivers and passengers cannot be trusted to exercise safe behavior on their own, the solution is to catch them when they fail, and to document the ability to place the blame for this failure where it belongs. Video cameras perform this function, often to a degree of excellence, where it is sorely needed.

Finally, one reason that operators in many modes of public transportation do not install video cameras is that they can produce troubling evidence about the cause of an incident when a lawsuit occurs. Personally, I would like to see a greater use of video cameras on all modes of public transportation, as well as requirements for how many, and where they should be positioned, on each mode of transportation. But I am not the King. If anything, I anticipate a lessening of many regulations in the next few years, particularly at the Federal level. In this environment, I would clearly not expect the installation of video cameras to expand. But where they already exist, efforts to occasionally view the footage of what they capture would contribute to safety, particularly as they would likely reinforce the drivers’ conformance with certain industry standards – particularly their use of all the mirrors. And in modes where attendants are on board, the use of video cameras mounted in certain critical positions would likely encourage their compliance with their responsibilities.

While passenger management problems cause distractions, passengers do not control the operation of the vehicles. As incidents are rarely their fault, the use of video cameras would genuinely contribute to public transportation safety.