CHARLESTON, W.Va. — West Virginia law enforcement officers now have more capability to pursue drivers who ignore the flashing lights of stopped school buses.
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin signed legislation placing liability on the registered owner of a vehicle that violates traffic laws by passing a bus.
Prior to the bill, law enforcement had to have eye-witness testimony of the person operating the vehicle in violation before a citation could be issued. It wasn’t enough said Jackson County Sen. Mitch Carmichael, who sponsored the legislation.
“We have too many instances of vehicles passing school buses while they’re loading and unloading children,” Carmichael told MetroNews affiliate WMOV in Ravenswood. “We have to do more to protector our children and this bill does that.”
On-board cameras are widely available as evidence of a violation for law enforcement to follow up their investigation. However, until now the video evidence was largely useless unless a positive identification of the driver could be made from the video.
“It’s always been illegal to pass a school bus, obviously,” Carmichael said. “Prior to passage of this bill, if you couldn’t identify the driver but you could find the vehicle, law enforcement still could not utilize that information.”
Moving forward, the owner of the vehicle is on the hook for the citation. However, Carmichael said lawmakers were careful to write the bill to insure charges would fall to somebody else if it could be proven the car was actually being operated in violation by another person.
“This bill enables them to create a presumption the owner of the vehicle was driving.”