I have been around the charter bus business for most of my life.  When I was a teenager, I would work on buses with my dad (the late Bobby Ray Steelman, Founder of Lone Star Coaches) and when I turned 15, I received my hardship license and started driving our one bus to the car wash to fuel or to a local shop for maintenance. 

Since taking over as General Manager of the business in 2009, one of the special projects I drove for the company was choosing a vendor to supply video cameras on all 15 of our coaches.  Lone Star Coaches is one of a few companies in a co-insurance group with National Interstate called Calypso.  As a group, Calypso mandated that cameras be added to all coaches in the group to improve safety and reduce accidents.  After evaluating several vendors who could provide the service they needed, Lone Star Coaches choose Rosco's Dual-Vision™ recorder.  Lone Star was one of the first of many companies in the insurance group to choose Rosco.

I have become a firm believer in the technology and I depend on the Dual-Vision™ cameras to protect my drivers, my coaches and my customers.  Besides using the cameras to routinely monitor my drivers so I can gain insight and feedback on their performance, Dual-Vision™ has given Lone Star an advantage in two recent incidents.

In the first incident, one of my coaches was sideswiped going down the highway.  As soon as the event occurred, the driver hit the device's panic button to ensure the incident was permanently captured on the SD card as a highlighted event.  The driver then followed the car and video captured the make, model and license number off of the car.  All of the pre and post incident video footage was also recorded based on the continuous recording capability of Dual-Vision.  Fortunately the other driver finally decided to stop.  They exchanged insurance information and when we filed the claim and told the other insurance company that we had video showing that we were traveling in the center of our lane when struck by their client, they quickly moved to close the claim.

In a more recent event, one of our coaches was broadsided by a car that ran a red light.  Police were called to the scene and completed insurance exchange forms for each driver, but they did not file a report stating fault by any driver.  After filing a claim with the other driver's insurance company, we were told that their insured would not talk to them and they had no way to verify who was at fault.  We were even told that the claims supervisor had reviewed the case and had decided that they were going to deny the claim.  Since they apparently decided to play dumb, I told the insurance company that we had video clearly showing that our coach had the right of way.  The video showed that just as our driver passed the last white line of the cross walk, the light turned yellow and then you could hear the bus being hit, the passengers saying "what was that" and the driver stating "he ran the red light and hit me".  Once the insurance company heard that, they said to send over the video and that should provide us with enough information to settle the claim. 

The costs recovered from the first incident more than paid for the cost of all 15 cameras, and the cost recovered from the second incident more than covered the cost to repair our coach. We are now ordering cameras for all of our company cars and considering them for our personal vehicles as well.