Have you ever noticed the flashing orange lights on the back of public buses in Sydney? These lights are active on buses carrying children during school hours when the doors are opened. They also remain flashing for 10-20 seconds after the doors are closed. The idea is simple: the flashing lights create something like a mobile school zone. Motorists are required to slow down to 40km/h when passing the bus, and this (in theory) reduces the likelihood of pedestrian and vehicle collisions involving school children. These warning lights are active between 7:30am-9:30am and 2:30pm-5:00pm on school days only. You may have noticed that these are the standard school zone hours +1 hour before and after.
However, very few motorists (if any) actually slow down to 40km/h when passing a bus with the flashing lights activated, particularly on main roads. There are many possible factors at play here. One may be the inconsistent operation of school bus warning lights by bus drivers. The lights are operated by a switch in the driver’s cab, meaning that individual drivers may forget (or deliberately refuse) to switch the warning lights on or off at proper times. An example of this is seeing a bus late on a weeknight with the school bus warning lights active. In this case the driver might have turned the warning lights on correctly during the afternoon, but forgotten to switch them off at 5:00pm.
Another likely cause for confusion is the way that the warning lights remain active for 10-20 seconds after the doors are closed. This means that it is common for a bus departing a given stop to reach a speed of 60km/h or more before the lights cut out automatically (you can probably see the issue here). If the flashing lights on the back of the bus require passing vehicles to slow to 40km/h, then why is the bus allowed to exceed this speed?
In my opinion, these issues combine to make school bus warning lights confusing and ineffective as a road safety measure. However, the existing warning lights could be repurposed as a useful tool to give other road users better indication of a bus driver’s intentions while at bus stops. On that note, I would like to suggest the following changes to the operation of school bus warning lights:
The warning lights should be active at all times, not just during school hours
Motorists should be mindful of boarding/alighting bus passengers at all times of day and at the weekend, not just during school hours. Thus, it makes sense for the warning lights to operate on all public route services every day of the year. Some may argue that the requirement to slow down to 40km/h is unnecessary outside of school hours. However, given that this is rarely followed in practice, it is likely to have minimal impact on actual travel speeds. If the 40km/h limit is actually followed, it will reduce traffic speed slightly and make it easier for a bus to re-enter the line of traffic from a bus stop.
The warning lights should activate only when the doors are actually open, and switch off within 5 seconds after all doors are closed.
This will help other road users (including other buses) to identify whether buses ahead of them are stopped at a bus stop (with the doors open) or just waiting in queued traffic, which will help them choose whether to overtake or wait behind the stopped bus ahead. This will also reduce confusion from other motorists when accelerating buses exceed 40km/h while the warning lights are still activated.
Overall, these changes would improve bus operations and overall road safety by making better use of an existing feature on all city buses. Importantly, it requires a simple regulatory change and avoids expensive modifications to a large existing fleet of buses.
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