A street in Oakland, California, viewed through AI cameras from startup Hayden AI. Transit agencies across the United States are deploying company systems to keep bus lanes clear of illegally parked cars.
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KENILWORTH, NJ – If you’re the type of driver who parks in the bus lane for a quick errand, you might want to think twice.
Nation Largest transportation systems They use AI-powered cameras To keep it Bus lanes are clear Of illegally parked cars.
The company behind these cameras is a startup called Hayden Iwhich offered to illustrate how they work in real life on the streets near its offices in this New Jersey suburb.
“What you see on the screen now is the system that identifies different things as we drive down the road,” said Charlie Territto, chief growth officer at Hayden AI, as we rode in the back of a specially outfitted truck. .
Cameras are installed inside the windshield, where they can capture everything that happens in front of the bus. The system analyzes those images to decide if it’s looking at a vehicle, and whether that vehicle is parked where it shouldn’t be, Terito says.
In just three years, Hayden AI has launched its services with transit agencies in New York, Washington, D.C., Oakland, California, and Los Angeles. The company is deploying pilot programs in Seattle and Denver, and is talking with other cities, including Philadelphia and Chicago.
Camera systems use artificial intelligence to help transit agencies catch and fine drivers who illegally block bus lanes and bus stops. But Terito says that’s not the ultimate goal.
“When you look at the reason for enforcement, the real reason is not writing tickets. It’s changing driver behavior,” Territo said in an interview. “And what we are seeing is a decrease in the number of repeat offenders.”
Charlie Territto, chief growth officer at Hayden AI, stands in front of camera equipment at the company’s offices in New Jersey.
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There is some evidence that these camera systems help buses move faster, although their rollout has hit some speed bumps.
“It works great,” Richard Davey, former head of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said in an interview last year. “It’s behavioral change, which is what we want. It increases the speed of our buses.”
The MTA operates New York City’s subways and buses, with its buses transporting more than two million people daily. Devi says passengers are complaining about the slow movement of buses.
“We ask our customers, ‘What’s stopping them from using our services more? What kind of bothers them?’ Davey said.
“Our bus customers have told us that bus reliability, wait times and traffic are their three biggest issues,” he said. “So I’m sure some motorists somewhere will be unhappy about us doing this. But I can assure you there are two million bus customers who will be happy.”
Transit advocates say Slow service It’s a big reason why fewer people ride the bus in the United States than in other countries. the MTA says its buses are 5% faster On roads where cameras were used, they were involved in 20% fewer collisions. So the agency moved to expand the program this year to include 20 new bus routes and 1,000 additional buses earlier this year.
But this expansion did not go as planned, as hundreds of drivers received wrong tickets.
“It wasn’t a worry at first, because you realized you were parked in a legal place,” said George Hahn, who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Traffic on Third Avenue in Manhattan earlier this year. Dozens of MTA bus routes are now equipped with AI-powered cameras to catch drivers blocking bus lanes.
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Hahn says he’s careful to only park in legal spaces, so he was surprised when tickets started arriving in the mail — including three in one day — and kept arriving.
“I think we got to about a dozen or so. There were definitely more than a dozen,” with a total cost of hundreds of dollars, Hahn said.
Han knew that these tickets were issued by mistake. At first, he tried to fight them in court. But that wasn’t working well. So Hahn and the local television station WNBC went public I picked up the story. After that, Han finally received a wave of messages apologizing for the tickets.
The MTA says about 800 tickets were issued in error due to a “software error” from Hayden AI. Additionally, the MTA says about 3,000 tickets were issued in error during what should have been a 60-day warning period for bus lane enforcement districts.
“The 60-day warning period is typically a turnaround phase during which such errors are identified and fixed,” MTA spokesman Eugene Resnick said in a statement. “All violations that were erroneously issued during what was intended to be a warning period have been or are being voided. Any payments made for tickets that were incorrectly issued will be refunded.”
Hayden AI says these programming bugs have been fixed.
“Any time there’s a big program, there’s going to be bumps along the way,” Hayden’s Charlie Territto said. The problems in New York “had nothing to do with artificial intelligence or technology. It was actually a problem of formation.”
There is supposed to be an additional level of human review, with someone from the New York City Department of Transportation examining each video of an alleged violation before deciding whether to issue a ticket.
The Department of Transportation declined to comment on why these auditors were unable to obtain hundreds of fault tickets for cars that were legally parked.
George Hahn says he supports the program’s goal of keeping bus lanes clear. However, he says the incident raises bigger questions about artificial intelligence. There’s a lot of talk in medicine about how and when to use AI, and a healthy dose of skepticism, says Hahn, the dermatologist.
“In medicine, we’ve been trained to be a bit pessimistic about new technologies before we think they’re ready because we don’t want to hurt our patients,” Hahn said. “Maybe you could say, yeah, the risks are lower. These are some parking tickets. It all worked out in the end. But, you know, our city spends all this money. There has to be some level of accountability for these programs.”