This spring, a beachside city in Southern California will become the first in the nation where municipal parking-enforcement vehicles use an AI system to identify potential bike lane violations.
Starting in April, the City of Santa Monica will outfit seven cars in its parking enforcement fleet with Hayden AI’s scanning technology, extending deployment beyond similar cameras already mounted on the city’s buses.
“Reducing illegal parking as much as possible makes riding a bike safer,” Charley Territo, chief growth officer at Hayden AI, told Ars.
Hayden AI’s bus-mounted cameras, built to detect bike lane and bus zone violations, are already in two other California cities — Oakland and Sacramento. The company also has systems deployed nationwide, including in New York City, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia. In September 2025, the company announced it had installed 2,000 systems on buses around the world.
Late last year, over a 59-day period, Hayden AI said its technology detected more than 1,100 parking violations at the University of California, San Diego — and 88 percent of those involved blocking a bike lane.
Hayden AI says it sells the system to municipalities and related organizations to not only increase bus speeds by removing obstructions, but also to improve overall safety.
“We accomplish that by reducing one of the main causes of collisions with buses — vehicles moving into their lanes,” Territo added. “The fewer times buses have to turn, the fewer opportunities there are for a crash.”
