Source: communitech.ca
By: Anthony Reinhart
Nothing screams “safety” louder than a school bus, with its vivid yellow paint, flashing lights and pop-out Stop sign.
But what if the driver has been drinking?
Shocking as it seems, it’s not as unlikely a scenario as we’d all like to think.
Huron School Bus Driver Faces Impaired Charge, reads a headline dated April 15 of this year. Gatineau school van operator had four times legal blood-alcohol limit: police, reads another from the same day.
Mounted inconspicuously to the horn pad of a school bus steering wheel, the alcohol-sniffing sensor prevents the vehicle from moving unless the driver holds a hand over it for 10 seconds and it detects no ethanol emanating from the skin.
The device is currently being tested in a fleet of Ontario school buses in the lead-up to a roll-out to the entire school bus market in the coming months. If successful, Sober Steering sees potential for its technology to be standard equipment in all production vehicles someday.
I became aware of the company through Ellyn Winters-Robinson, a PR pro who helps area startups raise their profiles, and I was struck by several things: Sober Steering is a hardware startup with real technology, it’s solving a major and meaningful problem, and it chose to locate here in Waterloo Region, despite its roots in West Palm Beach, Fla.
That was more than enough for me to seek a sit-down with Catherine Carroll, Sober Steering’s Chief Operating Officer, who told me all about the company in a chat at the AC last week. A few days earlier, she had stopped by the Communitech Hub with a school bus to demonstrate her company’s device.
Read the full Q and A with Catherine on Communitech’s View from the ‘Loo column.