As oncoming traffic approaches, the intensity of an approaching vehicle’s headlights relative to the distance to the child is not sufficient to overcome the school bus’s headlight. “The reason for this phenomenon is that the child is backlit by a very close, very bright school bus headlight which is at the same level as the student. “What we found with lighting is that when kids cross between the bus and oncoming traffic, they almost become a silhouette and eventually disappear when they cross in front of the headlights,” Massa says. With current technology and lighting, as children cross between a bus and oncoming traffic, they eventually disappear as they cross in front of headlights, as seen in this demonstration. Massa’s team is working on lighting solutions to ensure children are seen as they load and unload the bus. “We’ve combined V2X teaching the system to learn bus stops and routes, this way it can predict when the bus is going to stop and transmit the alerts – providing additional motorist response time,” Massa explains. HAAS Alert's Safety Cloud alert system provides a preemptive alert to oncoming motorists about a stopped school bus. The team from HAAS Alert discovered that it could use nationwide cellular V2X technology that has a school bus route pre-programmed to send a preemptive digital alert from the school bus to oncoming motorists to make them aware there will be children loading and unloading a bus nearby. The team found that the primary contributor that generally leads to children being hit by someone other than the bus driver is either a distracted driver or an impaired driver. The researchers began doing testing to figure out what the optical characteristics were that caused problems with students crossing in front of the bus. So I thought, ‘let me just imagine I know nothing about school buses and start from there.’” Marrying V2X Technology with LED Lighting “It's been 20 years since I've been in buses. They’re looking at it through the lens of knowing how the bus industry works,” Massa says. “When they brought us the problem of, ‘kids are getting struck,’ we had to look at it from a different standpoint than every bus company that's ever looked at it. This unique perspective has helped Massa come up with technology to help students safely load and unload school buses. Massa’s experience working as a firefighter, particularly directing traffic after car accidents, has contributed to his knowledge of the unique needs of emergency vehicle lighting. HAAS Alert’s Safety Cloud cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) digital alerting and automotive capabilities is being studied in addition to illumination technology integrations from HiViz LED Lighting.Īccording to the description of the project in the contract award, as of 2021, there was no school bus V2X solution that, “exists in any meaningful scalable way…and there is no readily available solution to solve for school children being struck during evening hours when visibility is low. His team is working alongside HAAS Alert. Department of Transportation to research and develop technology capable of securing safe passage for children when crossing a roadway to board a school bus. In 2021, Massa’s company was contracted by the U.S. When an opportunity arose to participate in research on technology for school bus loading and unloading, Massa knew he wanted to take the chance to revisit his love of buses. He has also worked as a firefighter, so he knows his way around a fire truck. His company is particularly well known in the fire truck industry, providing around 30% of white lights on new fire trucks, Massa estimates. Now, Massa owns his own company, HiViz Lighting, INC, which produces LED scene lighting for emergency vehicles. That experience sparked a lifelong passion for manufacturing, business, engineering, and of course school buses. After hearing his story during a tour at the company’s factory, Thomas Built invited Massa to the 1999 National Association for Pupil Transportation (NAPT) Conference & Trade Show in Denver, exposing him to all of the technology that’s part of the pupil transportation industry. Massa’s love of school buses ran so deep that his bedroom door was even replaced by a set of retired Thomas Built bus doors. Massa’s mom said the company even implemented some of the suggestions her son recommended regarding their website and its product lineup. As time went on, Massa regularly visited Thomas Built’s website to learn about the company’s different bus models, and even communicated with employees.
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