How this transportation tech startup is using AI to improve public transit

If a delayed bus has ever messed with your morning commute, one San Francisco-based tech startup might be able to help.

Hayden AI has developed a vision AI system that it’s deploying in numerous US cities with the goal of improving public transit. The company is leveraging artificial intelligence to enforce violations when vehicles obstruct bus lanes.

Hayden AI’s system uses cameras mounted on buses to monitor bus lanes, capture images, apply algorithms to the images, and collect evidence of parking violations in bus lanes that it then sends to the relevant authorities.

“As we saw more and more cities looking to add things like bus lanes, there became a recognition that without some type of enforcement, the rules around the use of the lanes were likely to be ignored,” Charles Territo, Hayden AI’s chief growth officer, told Tech Brew.

The system is working as designed if it accomplishes four objectives: boosts on-time arrivals of buses, reduces bus collisions, decreases greenhouse gas emissions by cutting down on the amount of time buses spend idling, and increases ridership.

“The more efficient, the more reliable, the safer those routes were, the more people would choose transit,” Territo said.

All of this is particularly relevant to public transit users with disabilities, who, as Territo pointed out, are “uniquely impacted” when drivers block access to buses.

Case studies: Hayden AI’s system is in use by numerous transit providers, including New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), DC’s Metro, and Los Angeles’s Metro.

The MTA reported a 5% improvement in bus lane speeds along enforced routes, as well as 20% fewer vehicle collisions. MTA officials have deemed the technology useful enough to expand its use to bus stops and to enforce double-parking violations. By the end of this year, the agency expects to have over 1,000 buses on 33 routes equipped with the tech.

“Keeping bus stops clear is critical to ensuring all of our customers can safely get on and off the bus,” Quemuel Arroyo, the MTA’s chief accessibility officer, said in a statement. In a news release announcing the expansion, Riders Alliance, a nonprofit group dedicated to improving public transit for riders in New York City, also expressed support for automated camera enforcement.

AC Transit in Oakland, California, also recently announced it was expanding its use of Hayden AI’s system to bus stops on all routes in its service area. The agency reported that the technology resulted in citation efficiency that was over 34 times better during a roughly month-long period this summer, compared to a similar period last year.

“Although our transit district anticipated an increase, the actual number of motorists cited for violating the bus-only lane laws reinforced the safety imperative to expand AI-powered camera use across our bus network,” AC Transit said in a news release.

AC Transit acknowledged some of the privacy concerns the technology could prompt, but noted safeguards—such as ensuring cameras don’t capture video inside buses and the system not having facial recognition capabilities—are in place.

More data, please: Broadly, Territo said he views AI as a tool for improving public transportation by providing city planners with more data.

“The more data that can be captured about the transit network and the impediments to that transit network behaving the way it was designed,” he said, “the better that network will be.”

Hayden AI recently completed a $90 million Series C funding round; the startup has raised more than $193 million since launching in 2019, per Crunchbase. Territo said the company will invest in hardening its platform, launching new products, and expanding its international business.