Tom Drischler // Aspen Hill // from nextdoor
The evidence shows it has done nothing to improve schoolchildren’s safety.
July 1, 2026, marked the ten-year anniversary of Montgomery County’s school bus stop light camera ticketing program. According to data compiled by MCPD, as of July 2026, the program generated $102,808,250 in fines from 419,152 school bus stop light infractions as follows:
FY 2017 – Citations: 16,388 – Fines: $2,048,500
FY 2018 – Citations: 34,201 – Fines: $8,549,125
FY 2019 – Citations: 54,837 – Fines: $13,708,125
FY 2020 – Citations: 50,698 – Fines: $12,674,500
FY 2021 – Citations: 7,058 – Fines: $1,764,500
FY 2022 – Citations: 59,614 – Fines: $14,903,500
FY 2023 – Citations: 52,066 – Fines: $13,016,500
FY 2024 – Citations: 50,942 – Fines: $12,809,500
FY 2025 – Citations: 51,596 – Fines: $12,899,000
FY 2026 – Citations: 41,752 – Fines: $10,438,000
TEN-YEAR TOTAL: 419,152 citations totaling $102,808,250 in fines
FY 2015 was the last complete Fiscal Year before school bus camera ticketing was introduced into the county (starting with a modest pilot program in early 2016). Here is the MCPD data for school bus stop light infractions in FY 2015, in which all the citations were issued by on-scene MCPD officers:
FY 2015 – Citations: 669 – Fines: $83,625 (Equal to about $114,000 in 2026 dollars.)
School bus transportation in the county, as in school districts throughout the U.S., is so safe that no amount of school bus camera tickets can improve it. This is supported by all available evidence, including the following specific to Montgomery County:
There were no documented collisions between passing vehicles and student pedestrians near school buses in FY 2015. No county agency keeps a record of such collisions.
In addition, former county Inspector General Edward Blansitt III wrote in his final 2019 memo: “We contacted both MCPD and the Maryland State Police and requested data on school bus stop-light violations resulting in pedestrian collisions in Montgomery County; neither agency could locate any record of such a collision in Montgomery County for at least the past eight years.” Those eight years were 2011 through 2018. An online search of media posts found mention of three such collisions since 2018; two in 2019 and one in 2022 (all nonfatal, thankfully).
MCPS buses transport about 100,000 students to and from school every school day (there are 180 school days per year). That amounts to approximately 36 million individual student rides annually. Therefore, there have been three possible collisions involving passing vehicles and student pedestrians near school buses in the county over the last 15 years, during which time MCPS provided about half a billion school bus rides. Congratulations to MCPS on an excellent safety record for the many years before school bus camera ticketing started in MoCo, as well as the last ten years up to today.
My next post will cover: Where did the $102 million go?
To learn more about this subject, please refer to my Substack page, Moe Says No https://moesaysno.substack.com/
The 60% – 40% split is a lousy deal for the county. Suffolk County in Long Island also has a BusPatrol system identical to MoCo’s. Their deal is 45% for BusPatrol and 55% for Suffolk County. Marc Elrich has never explained where the now $34 million that has gone to MoCo from school bus tickets has been disbursed. It didn’t just get arbitrarily dumped into the General Fund. Circumstantial evidence strongly implies that all of it goes to MCPD. Of course, this relates to the single purpose of all the MCPD camera systems in the county, which is to provide an off-the-books cash cow for MCPD to hire mostly civilians in make-work jobs processing camera tickets, maintaining the cameras and doing God knows what with the personal information of every vehicle driver in the county through more than 800 Automated License plate Reader (ALPR) surveillance cameras. (The BusPatrol cameras on 1,400 MCPS buses are also ALPRs.) This includes 26 civilian employees of the MCPD Automated Traffic Enforcement Unit (ATEU). There are an undisclosed number of employees in the 4th Amendment violating Operational Intelligence Division. The county has 462 AI speed cameras and 76 AI stop light cameras. The numbers of invasive AI cameras for multiple purposes, all of which make the county a crummier place in which to live, will continue to increase with Elrich’s election to the County Council for another four years. There will be no checks or balances on him and Gino Renne, the president of the police union UFCW Local 1994 MCGEO. There has never been even a single public meeting or town hall in which county residents have been allowed to review and voice their opinions on any of these camera systems.
Fascism
Fascist regimes often do involve state-corporate collusion: government and favored businesses working together, crushing labor/opponents, privatizing gains, socializing losses, and using state power to protect aligned capital. Businesses scamming people with help from government is more directly called:
- crony capitalism
- corporatism / state corporatism
- regulatory capture
- kleptocracy
- oligarchy
- corruption
- rent-seeking
- state-enabled fraud