Senate Committee Eases School Bus Safety Law

A key Senate committee agreed Wednesday to ease a 7-month-old law intended to keep children safe by requiring that school buses use flashing red lights and bring traffic to a halt at every stop.

The move by the Senate Transportation Committee drew a mild rebuke from the father of a Laguna Niguel boy whose death helped spark creation of the law.

Tom Lanni, whose son, Tommy, was struck and killed after getting off a school bus in 1994, said the measure by Assemblywoman Virginia Strom-Martin (D-Duncans Mills) was “much improved” over earlier versions, which he thought would have gutted the law before it had a chance to work.

But the bill still has a “fundamental” flaw, Lanni said, because it would prohibit bus drivers from using red warning lights to stop motorists as far as 200 feet from a traffic signal. The change would prohibit the use of the warning lights at more than 50% of the school bus stops in his hometown.

“That,” Lanni said, “is my big problem.”

Strom-Martin said that use of the warning lights near a traffic signal is already prohibited by California law and that her bill simply clarifies when the blinkers shouldn’t be used. Use of warning lights near traffic signals, she said, causes confusion among motorists, creating the potential for accidents.

The transportation committee, which approved the measure on a 7-1 vote, was the key test for the bill. It now goes to the Senate Appropriations Committee, then to the floor for a vote.

As now drafted, Strom-Martin’s bill would eliminate the use of warning lights when a bus pulls off a high-speed rural state highway, when a child needs special assistance to unload or when a bus breaks down or is parked for an unusually long time to drop off children at school or a field trip.

It also would lift a requirement that drivers stop when approaching a school bus that is flashing its warning lights on the opposite side of a multilane or divided highway and when a road is covered with ice or snow.