Every school day, 26 million students ride school buses in the U.S. with parents trusting their children's safety to school bus and van drivers.
In 2023, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recorded about 12,000 accidents involving school buses alone. With advances in artificial intelligence (AI), student transportation solutions are getting safer.
"When people think about AI and students, they often think of the use cases for homework or in the classroom. But AI can make a difference for student safety and wellbeing. We're proud to partner with First Student on their mission of getting millions of students to and from school safely and efficiently every day," Sanjit Biswas, co-founder and CEO of Samsara, told Newsweek.
First Student, a company that specializes in student transportation, will install a suite of Samsara's AI-led technology on 46,000 vehicles in its fleet. The vehicles to be equipped include yellow school buses, minivans, Ford Transits and smaller vehicles that are a part of First Student's First Alt division (sedans, SUVs, minivans, wheel-chair accessible vehicles).
The transportation company services communities throughout North America, partnering with 20,000 schools in 42 states and eight Canadian provinces to provide transportation for 5.5 million K-12 student journeys daily, they told Newsweek.
Samara partnered with First Student to customize the HALO tech suite, which includes tech that is commonly found in passenger cars but is scarce in the fleet world: cameras with AI-powered risk detection and in-cab alerts, collision avoidance and hazard detection, predictive safety analytics and post-trip insights. Supervisors will be able to review trends in driving behaviors and discover coachable moments to support continued safe vehicle operation.
The technology has been honed for most types of vehicles First Student operates.
During the pilot phase, First Student was able to show that it could reduce accidents by nearly 30 percent and harsh braking by more than 40 percent with Samsara's technology.
It also enables better fleet operations for school districts, working to optimize routes, reduce delays and streamline maintenance.
Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is possible via on-board Wi-Fi, which also enables more accurate ride time updates for parents via First Student's First View app.
"First Student's award-winning HALO is the first fully integrated technology platform built specifically for K-12 transportation, and we are now enhancing it with Samsara's Connected Operations Platform... This is First Student living our value of setting the highest standard by innovating safety technology and ushering in a new era of student transportation," John Kenning, CEO and president of First Student, told Newsweek.