The MTA has quietly rolled out artificial intelligence to monitor turnstile-jumping in more than a half-dozen subway stations, according to a new report.
The transit agency installed third-party technology designed by a Spanish company to help station controllers crack down on fare evasion at seven unnamed stations and plans to add it to two dozen more stations within the year “with more to follow,” according to NBC News and a transit report.
It’s unclear when the AI program was first put to use, but it was highlighted in the agency’s May report.
The MTA insisted the technology created by the company AWAAIT is not being used to send info on the fare evaders to the NYPD, but an agency spokesperson declined to comment if that will change when asked by NBC.
Instead, the transit authority said the AI is being used to monitor fare evasion incidents to collect data and observe trends.
“We’re using it essentially as a counting tool,” MTA Communications Director Tim Minton told the news station. “The objective is to determine how many people are evading the fare and how are they doing it.”
The transit system has lost $690 million from unpaid fares since 2022.
The AI technology connects to the transit system’s expansive 10,000-camera surveillance system and records videos of the straphangers hopping turnstiles, walking in through emergency exit gates, entering subway stations two at a time and other methods of skipping the swipe.
A promotional video created by AWAAIT demonstrating the tech states that images of a fare dodger taken by the cameras can be automatically sent to the station manager’s phone within seconds.
Minton said the city’s videos are stored on the MTA’s servers “for a limited period,” according to NBC.
Still, privacy advocates told the outlet they worry the technology goes too far.
“This is a moment where movement around the city has never been more surveilled,” said Albert Fox Cahn, the director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit legal group that advocates for privacy rights in the Big Apple.
A heavily-redacted July 2022 MTA contract obtained by Cahn through a Freedom of Information Law request and shared with the outlet reveals that the transit authority first tested the technology in NYC in 2020 and gradually expanded its use over 2021 and 2022.
The news of the AI program comes days before New Yorkers will have to fork up more cash to take the city’s subways and buses. The $2.75 fare will increase to $2.90 beginning on August 20 in its first price hike since 2015.
Critics have said the MTA’s enforcement against fare evasion is in effect criminalizing poverty.
“It’s really unfortunate that rather than thinking about how the city and state can be making these services more available, more accessible to the public, they’re spending all this time and money on enforcement mechanisms to try to get money from the lowest-income New Yorkers,” Legal Aid Society attorney Molly Griffard told NBC.
The MTA has spent at least $35,335 — and likely more — on the AI tech, according to available reports. The agency made two purchases for the “AWAAIT Video Analytics Fare Evasion Software” in 2021 at that price, according to GovSpend. The purchasing figures for 2022 weren’t in the government spending database, according to the outlet.
The transit authority is also spending more than $45 million a year to make subway turnstiles harder to climb over and slip past the gates in its effort to decrease the amount of fare evasion in the system. It’s also exploring replacing the aging turnstiles with new gates that are near impossible to hop over.
However, those efforts wouldn’t fix the most common way straphangers skip the trip fee. The MTA’s own AI technology on fare evasion found that more than half of fare evasion incidents consist of people walking into stations through the emergency exit gates.