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Case Study: Surveillance Cameras at Secaucus Junction

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

Outside New Jersey Transit's heavily air-conditioned headquarters, a sweltering June lunch hour is heating up. It's the grungy kind of city day that air-conditioning was invented formuggy with too little breeze, too much concrete. Ernie Pawling, principal technical specialist in New Jersey Transit's IT department, has just come back from fixing some cameras at New York Penn Station. A sweat-drenched shirt pokes out from underneath his orange safety vest, evidence of why the surveillance system has become so popular with employees who need a window into the stations: "They don't have to leave their desks," says Pawling, who is the only IT employee who works full-time on the surveillance system. "The more people use it, the more people want it."

And use it they do. In fact, says a spokesman for Transit, only half of the benefits of the system are related to police activities and security. There are as many other examples of benefits as there are passengers. If a passenger says the last train of the night blazed by, customer service can view the video of the tracks just after midnight and see whether the train did indeed fail to stop. If a passenger says a ticket booth operator was belligerent, customer service can pull up the video of the transaction. If a late-night train is running a little behind schedule, train operators (at least in theory) can hold another train to give passengers enough time to make their connection. If there's a storm, the maintenance crew can see how much snow has accumulated on the tracks. If an escalator breaks down, operations could even have the Nice software calculate how many people have traveled on the escalator since its last maintenance.

Slack couldn't provide specific numbers, but he says that the number of customer injury claims that are filed and paid out has decreased significantly. Once, for instance, Slack says that the cameras recorded a man try to catch his train by jumping off a platform, crossing Amtrak's high-speed train tracks and climbing up the platform on the other side. As Slack remembers, the man fell and cut his head, was nearly killed and missed his train anyway. "Without the video," Slack predicts, "he would have walked upstairs to station management and said, 'I tripped and fell and cut my head. Give me a claims form.'"

The surveillance system has transferred liability as well. In May, when the Portal Bridge near the Secaucus Junction station caught fire, disrupting service for the entire Northeast corridor, Chief Bober says he was able to prove that New Jersey Transit was not responsible. (Amtrak owns the bridge, but New Jersey Transit uses itpart of a delicate arrangement that often leads to disputes up and down the Northeast corridor.) "We were able to go back to the digital recordings and substantiate how the bridge caught fire," Bober says. "If we didn't have that system in place, New Jersey Transit more than likely would have been liable."