A new petition urges the Obama administration to fund a proposed study to investigate school bus driver distraction. 

The study would be conducted by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute’s Center for Truck and Bus Safety, and it would cost approximately $900,000. The purpose of the study would be to collect naturalistic, real-time data of school bus drivers performing their normal driving tasks during bus routes.

The data would be analyzed to determine distraction sources experienced by the bus drivers and their association with the occurrence of safety-critical events (i.e., crashes, near-crashes and crash-relevant conflicts).

The research team would reportedly work closely with public and private school transportation providers to outfit numerous school buses with data-collection systems that would capture video, sound and vehicle kinematic data for further analysis.

To read more about the proposed study, click here.

To read and sign the petition, go here. The goal is to obtain 25,000 signatures by Jan. 15.