This spring, a Southern California beach town will become the first city in the country where municipal parking enforcement vehicles will use an AI system looking for potential bike lane violations.
Beginning in April, the City of Santa Monica will bring Hayden AI’s scanning technology to seven cars in its parking enforcement fleet, expanding beyond similar cameras already mounted on city buses.
“The more we can reduce the amount of illegal parking, the safer we can make it for bike riders,” Charley Territo, chief growth officer at Hayden AI, told Ars.
Hayden AI’s bus cameras, designed to detect bike lane and bus zone violations, currently exist in two other California cities: Oakland and Sacramento. The company also has installations around the country, including New York City, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia. In September 2025, the company announced that it had installed 2,000 systems on buses worldwide.
Late last year, over a 59-day period, Hayden AI also said its technology detected over 1,100 parking violations at the University of California, San Diego—and 88 percent of those were instances of blocking a bike lane.
Hayden AI says it sells its product to municipalities and related entities to not only increase bus speed (by removing obstructions) but also improve safety.
“We do that by [reducing] one of the biggest causes of collisions with buses—moving out of their lanes,” Territo added. “So the fewer times they have to make a turn, the fewer instances there are [of a crash].”