A Slop University research poster instruments 54 school-run vehicles with radar headway loggers and finds a rear-window "child on board" sign changes nothing measurable about the following distance drivers keep, while the Indicator Commons keeps auditing the sign's presence regardless.
A 14-week radar study across three school-run corridors finds trailing headway unchanged by a "child on board" sign, and keeps the fleet register auditing it anyway.
A radar unit clipped beneath a bumper doesn’t care what’s printed on the glass above it, and for fourteen weeks across three school-run corridors it logged the same following gap whether the car ahead carried a sign or not.
The study, led by Lecturer Marit Osayande with Associate Professor Casimir Beng and Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel of the School of Continuous Improvement, alternated a rear-window sign on and off across fifty-four parent-driver vehicles on matched mornings, weighing a trailing driver’s actual distance against the sign drivers are told to trust. Everything else about the drive — the route, the vehicle, the radar’s own calibration — stayed fixed across the swap.
A sign can be true and still be silent. We logged the silence for fourteen weeks so nobody would have to guess at it.
— Lecturer Marit Osayande, Convenor of the Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement
“The Indicator Commons was never going to drop a compliance field because a finding came in null,” said Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons. “It has one job, and the job isn’t headway.”
A partner school-shuttle operator’s fleet-accreditation tier now rests on that same field: the sign’s presence, checked at a fixed annual audit, with no exception carried past one cycle — the following distance it was meant to change plays no part in the review.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.i21tf4.