MTA Weighs AI Video Analytics to Monitor 15,000 Transit Cameras for Safety Risks
The authority is reviewing December submissions from tech firms to determine feasibility for a round-the-clock safety system.
Overview
- The agency’s December request for information sought scalable, real-time tools to flag weapons, unattended items, and risky crowd surges.
- MTA documents describe a shift from manual monitoring toward a proactive, intelligence-driven response across roughly 472 stations.
- Officials say facial recognition is not referenced in the request, while privacy advocates warn of misclassification and harmful police encounters.
- The plan calls for behavioral-science and psychology experts to help define unsafe behaviors and reduce false positives.
- There is no deployment timeline as the MTA reviews vendor responses for a 24/7 network that serves nearly 4 million daily riders, following earlier pilots that produced many false positives.