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Case Study: Surveillance Cameras at Secaucus Junction

New Jersey Transit's new station finds other benefits in its security cameras

Instead, all that transit authorities can do is try to watch what's going on in stations, on tracks, on trains and on buses. And the most efficient way to do this is with cameras. Lots of cameras. Cameras fixed on platforms. Cameras pointed up and down the tracks. Cameras at the kiss-and-ride. Cameras installed in elevators. Cameras pointed at escalators, and benches, and ticket booths, and ticket vending machines, and lines for coffee, and pretty much everything everywhere except the restrooms.

Train stations have long had CCTV (closed-circuit television), of course. What's different in Secaucus Junction is that the surveillance system was built into the plans for the building and was intended from day one to be a high-quality, accessible and smart network of cameras.

"You gotta remember, we had CCTV way before [9/11] ever happened," Slack says. "We had 800 cameras [systemwide]. But they were unusable. Meaning, if you had a customer service complaint at Metropark [Station], you were going to throw somebody in a car, go to Metropark, walk into a room, and maybe or maybe not play back a VHS tape from a complaint that happened 30 days ago."

As Slack says this, he's sitting in a conference room at New Jersey Transit headquarters across the street from Newark Penn Station. At one end of the long, narrow room is an ordinary desktop computer, hooked up to the ordinary network for New Jersey Transit. At the other end of the room is a large projection screen. Slack logs on and punches a few things into the computer, and then starts pulling up video feed. Every camera in Secaucus Junctionas well as at other train and bus stations where the old VHS CCTV system has been upgradedis now at Slack's fingertips. In an instant, he can access not only real-time video but archives. He pulls up video of a ticket counter at New York Penn Station from that morning's rush hour. A passenger hands a New Jersey Transit customer-service representative money, and receives change and a commuter-rail ticket in return.

The picture quality is pretty good, although the cameras themselves are nothing fancy. Even with the security funding that followed 9/11, Transit couldn't justify buying IP-based cameras, and wireless cameras would have raised reliability issues as well as the price tag. Instead, Slack and Bober focused on camera density. They invested in dozens and dozens of inexpensive, fixed cameras, and in a handful of more expensive pan-tilt cameras that swivel and zoom. The whole system (not counting the network) cost about $1.5 million to install and deploynot a huge chunk of the $26 million worth of technology that went into the $450 million station.