This spring, a Southern California seaside city will become the first city in the country to have municipal parking enforcement vehicles use an AI system to look 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 installed on city buses.
“The more we can reduce the amount of illegal parking, the more we can make it safer for bikers,” Charlie Territo, chief development 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 establishments across the country, including New York City, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia. In September 2025, the company announced that it had installed 2,000 systems in buses worldwide.
Late last year, over a period of 59 days, Hayden AI also said its technology detected more than 1,100 parking violations at the University of California, San Diego—and 88 percent of them were instances of blocking bike lanes.
Hayden AI says it sells its product to municipalities and related entities to not only increase bus speeds (by removing obstacles) but also improve safety.
“We do this [reducing] “The number one cause of collisions with buses is drifting out of your lane,” Territo said. So the fewer times they have to turn, the fewer incidents there will be. [of a crash]”
<a href