Cities look to AI-powered cameras to keep bus lanes clear – GWC Mag

Dive Brief:

• The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority is the most recent U.S. transit agency to deploy AI-powered camera systems from Hayden AI to monitor and enforce bus lane and bus stop violations.
• LA Metro joins New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., along with AC Transit in Alameda and Contra Costa counties in California, in using artificial intelligence to detect vehicles illegally parked in bus lanes and bus stops. LA’s systems will be fully operational this spring, Hayden AI said in December.
• Looking to further enhance public transportation, Hayden AI announced a partnership in February with LYT, a provider of intelligent connected traffic technology solutions, to combine the location feature of Hayden AI’s bus-mounted cameras with LYT’s transit signal priority technology to give transit buses green lights at intersections with minimal disruption to the normal flow of traffic.

Dive Insight:

Clear bus lanes can help buses move faster and passengers get to their destinations more reliably. A March 2024 Urban Institute study in partnership with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority found that “well-enforced and unobstructed priority bus lanes” could increase access to jobs reachable within 30 minutes by 90% for the average D.C resident.

More frequent and reliable transit bus service is an equity issue, the Urban Institute study says. In the area served by the Washington, D.C., Metro, 46% of bus riders are defined as lower-income, 58% are Black or African-American and 16% are Hispanic.

But it’s not enough to just mark off bus priority lanes. Even if the lanes are clear 75% of the time, “their benefit in terms of average job accessibility would decline by more than half” compared with a scenario in which lanes are clear all the time, the UI study says.

Washington Metro, also known as WMATA, and the District Department of Transportation jointly initiated the Clear Lanes Project beginning in July 2023, equipping 140 buses with automated cameras to monitor nearly 13 miles of bus lanes and 3,000 bus zones, which are the areas around bus stops. As of January, DDOT had issued more than 48,000 warning notices since last July, according to city data obtained by The Washington Post, and D.C. began ticketing drivers $100 for each violation on Jan. 29.

The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority contracted with Hayden AI in 2022 to install automated cameras on 500 transit buses. According to a September press release from the office of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, average bus speeds in Brooklyn had increased by about 5% since the implementation of the automated cameras and collisions with buses had decreased by nearly 20%. New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said, “Automated bus lane enforcement has proven to change driver behavior and keep our bus lanes clear.”