Culver City using AI to detect and enforce violations that slow down bus service

CULVER CITY, Calif. (KABC) -- The days of using the bus lanes in Culver City for a quick stop to drop off or pick up are ending.

The city is now using cameras and artificial intelligence to detect and enforce violations that slow its bus service and negatively impact the safety of everyone's commute.

"You want to just double park, but that creates an inconvenience for someone else and makes it more dangerous for everyone," said Culver City Mayor Dan O'Brien. "If you've got to dodge into the other lane to get around to a double parked car, we want to keep everyone safe."

Chief Transportation Officer Diana Chang adds, "If buses are reliable, they can get from point A to point B efficiently, and hopefully faster in some cases than driving when you're in traffic. I think that will start changing people's mindset to consider using mass transit as at least one way of moving around."

Over the next 60 days, drivers will receive a warning ticket, but after that, a violation will cost $293.

Charley Territo of Hayden AI said his company's technology for the Culver City buses was first used in New York City, and since 2019, that bus system saw speeds increase 5% and collisions decrease by over 30%.

"The fewer times the bus needs to make a movement in and out of a lane, the fewer times that there's an opportunity for that bus to be involved in some type of collision," he said.

Jennifer Atenza with the Culver City Police Department called it a force multiplier.

"We can't be everywhere at all times, so the camera system will send the information over to our parking enforcement unit. They'll be able to review it and then issue the citations if it applies. It helps us to be able to direct our personnel towards priority issues."

The cameras will not issue moving violations, and again, the parking violation be reviewed by an officer human to determine if it's valid. But the AI element of the technology allows the system to learn which images will actually lead to a ticket.

"Every time that an event is sent to PD and the PD rejects that event, we know why they've rejected that event, and we teach the system that when it sees that again, not to capture that event maybe because the PD is going to reject it," said Territo.

Culver City joins Los Angeles and about seven other cities who use automated camera enforcement, and each city faces different challenges along its bus routes, but Territo said Hayden's system will translate into a more efficient mass transit system.

"This platform has the ability to scale, and it has the ability to adapt to whatever type of roadway we see or whatever type of road configuration a city may have," he said.