Millions of illegal passing violations occur across the U.S. each year. While the instances are universal, the rules governing them are not. Pupil transportation experts
noted in March at STN EXPO East in North Carolina that inconsistency is part of the problem. Uniform standards could be key to saving lives.
“People just don’t know what to do,” said Derek Graham, a retired state director with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and current industry consultant, during the March 29 session Illegal Passing NHTSA’s Latest Research Results.
At the center of the issue is the “loading zone triangle,” where the school bus, students and motorists intersect. When communication breaks down at any of those points, the consequences can be severe.
“Everything has to go wrong in order for a kid to get really hurt in this loading zone triangle,” Graham said. “But there’s a lot that has to go right.”
Students being injured in the Danger Zone—the 10-foot radius around stopped school buses—is often preventable, that is if education and expectations are aligned. However, the challenge of inconsistency remains.
School bus passing laws vary by state, and even by roadway type within states. All jurisdictions require a motorist to stop while overtaking from behind a stopped
school bus, regardless of road type. But 42 jurisdictions require a motorist to stop when approaching an on-coming, stopped school bus on undivided roadways, and only 12 require motorists to stop in “certain situations.” The most common (10 out of 12) being on an undivided roadway with fewer than four lanes.
Utah requires motorists to stop on undivided roadways of fewer than five lanes and Washington state only requires motorists to stop on undivided two-lane roadways. Florida, Guam, Hawaii, New York and West Virginia require a motorist to stop when approaching a stopped school bus on a divided roadway, whereas 40 jurisdictions do not. The remaining nine only require a motorist to stop when approaching a divided roadway of less than four lanes.
Additionally, state laws vary on what constitutes a divided highway, according to the State Laws on School Bus Passing report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The result is confusion, especially for motorists crossing state lines or encountering unfamiliar road layouts. Plus, student crossing rules also differ. California school
bus drivers must physically exit their vehicle armed with a stop paddle and the school bus keys and walk younger students across the street.
“It would be best if it was all the same, if everybody knew the same rule,” Graham said, citing research from NHTSA’s November 2024 report, Driver Knowledge of School Bus Passing Laws: A National Survey.
While more than 90 percent of motorists surveyed correctly identified when to stop behind a school bus on a four-lane, undivided roadway, only 53 percent knew to stop when approaching from the front. Just 17.5 percent answered correctly when a motorist is approaching from the front on a four-lane, divided roadway.
A November 2024 NHTSA national survey found that 30.5 percent of respondents said most drivers who illegally pass stopped school buses do so because they “didn’t care.”
The National Association of Pupil Transportation is also looking at uniform language to address the gap, a board member shared during the session.
That gap has led some districts (where states allow) to adopt automated enforcement cameras that capture violations and help issue citations. Such a program is in place in Austin, Texas, where officials recorded about 14,000 violations in a single school year. Austin ISD Executive Director of Transportation Kris Hafezizadeh shared that information with attendees during a March 30 panel discussion, Strategies to Remove Danger from the Loading & Unloading Zone.
“Think about that,” Hafezizadeh said, adding the number of repeat violators is about 1 percent. “Something is working.”
Camera enforcement, combined with public awareness, has shown promise. But even that approach depends on consistent legal frameworks, something not yet in place nationwide.
While illegal passing draws much attention, it is only one part of a broader safety picture. Recent student fatality data from the Kansas Department of Education’s
National School Bus Loading and Unloading Survey show that not all tragedies involve passing vehicles. A 55-year summary of the data indicates that school buses and their drivers account for 56.5 percent of all fatalities in the Danger Zone.
“These loading zone incidents are really about student pedestrians,” said session panelist Keba Baldwin, director of transportation at Prince George’s County Public
Schools in Maryland and 2025 STN Transportation Director of the Year. “Every student… is a pedestrian for some period of time before they get on that bus.”
That reality reinforces the need for a safe system approach, which assumes human error and builds multiple layers of protection. “Humans make mistakes,” said Graham, who moderated the discussion. “Drivers, kids, bus drivers, not everything is going to work at the same time to perfection.”
He noted adherence to three pillars of safety: Education, engineering and enforcement.
Education teaches drivers the law, trains students to navigate bus stop safety and ensures parents understand their role. Hafezizadeh said it’s important to train drivers, but also educate families. “Explain the why again,” he said.
Engineering involves vehicle design and infrastructure, from stop arms and lighting to route planning that minimizes the need for children to cross busy roads. Enforcement, whether through police or cameras, reinforces accountability.
Even with strong laws and enforcement, safety ultimately depends on what bus drivers can see and what they can’t. School buses are designed with specialized mirror systems and federal visibility standards intended to eliminate blind spots, particularly in the danger zone.
“The mirrors are only as good as their adjustment,” said industry expert Dave McDonald, during his March 28 session Focused Driver 111: Proper Mirror Adjustment and Distracted Driving.
Improperly adjusted mirrors can leave critical gaps directly in front of or alongside the bus, where children are most likely to be walking. Federal guidelines require drivers to maintain clear sightlines around the bus. But in practice, those standards are not always consistently enforced or checked.
McDonald took attendees outside to the parking lot to demonstrate how to adjust mirrors in compliance with FMVSS 111, the federal requirement used to capture as much of the Danger Zone as possible. Substitute drivers, time pressures and inconsistent training can all lead to compromised visibility, he noted, adding that some drivers are unable or unwilling to adjust mirrors properly and occasionally compensate by leaning or shifting in their seats. This workaround, McDonald called, “is a recipe for disaster.”
The consequences can be severe. In crash investigations, visibility failures are closely scrutinized, he said. If a bus does not meet required visibility standards at the time of an incident, even bigger issues can result.
“If the mirrors don’t pass that grid test… the big word liability comes out,” McDonald said. Even when mirrors are properly adjusted, blind spots cannot be eliminated entirely. Drivers must actively compensate by scanning, repositioning and maintaining constant awareness, especially during loading and unloading when children may move unpredictably.
The industry has seen several fatalities where a student was killed due to a dragging incident or to pick something up that they dropped after unloading from their school bus. Uniform standards not only for laws but also training and equipment are critical. Without consistency, the effectiveness of even the best-designed safety systems depends too heavily on individual habits.
McDonald added that poorly adjusted mirrors can prevent school bus drivers from seeing children in the Danger Zone. While he said camera technology and collision avoidance systems add new layers of protection, they can’t detect blind spots or identify potential hazards like humans can. At least not yet.
“You can’t program a computer to react to every [decision] a human will do in a spur of the moment,” McDonald said, emphasizing that human behavior remains unpredictable.
As the sessions at STN EXPO East reiterated, none of these efforts are fully effective alone and without consistency. Standardizing school bus passing laws could reduce confusion and improve compliance. “We’ve got decades of data showing [motorists are] going to pass,” Graham said. “So, we have to focus on what happens when they do, and how we keep kids safe.”
He noted that responsibility is not limited to the motorists that break the law but extends to the training that shapes the behavior. From the policies that guide
enforcement, and the education that prepares children and motorists, he said.
“Responsibility is shared,” Graham concluded. “It’s not just the bad guy who passed the school bus.”
Editor’s Note: As reprinted from the May 2026 issue of School Transportation News.
Related: Seatbelt, Danger Zone Recommendations Highlight NTSB Discussion at STN EXPO East
Related: 6 Students Killed in Danger Zone, All by School Buses
Related: Doubled Vision: Covering Your Danger Zone
Related: (STN Podcast E228) Freedom From Risk: How Districts Can Protect Students in the School Bus Danger Zone
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