With 850 miles of track, the New York City Subway is the longest system in the country, and it’s a monumental task to keep it anywhere close to fully functional. The MTA, the subway’s operator, partnered with Google to experiment with more efficient and cost-effective ways to inspect tracks. The four-month trial utilized AI and off-the-shelf technology from Google Pixel smartphones.
Google’s TrackInspect relies on the phone’s suite of accelerometers, magnetometers, and gyroscopes, as well as additional microphones mounted to subway cars to feel and listen for track defects. The tech giant is confident that AI models can be trained to supplement the work of human inspectors. During the trial, TrackInspect was only eight percent less capable than a human. The big pitch is that TrackInspect can narrow the focus and reduce the workload of actual people. Wired reported:
Eventually, the tech could become “a way we could minimize the amount of work that’s done to identify those defects, and point inspectors in the right direction, so they can spend time fixing instead of identifying, and go directly there and do the work,” says Demetrius Crichlow, the agency’s president. In the future, the MTA hopes to create a “modernized” system that automatically identifies and organizes fixes for track issues.
The MTA is pinching every penny
The MTA is intelligently trying to be more efficient with its budget despite the new influx of cash from the city’s new congestion pricing zone. The agency earmarked the revenue for capital projects to modernize and expand the system. Also, President Donald is vehemently against the congestion zone and has vowed to kill the program. The project’s swift end would thrust the MTA into a budget crisis, and the agency will do everything in its power to cut costs before pushing for a fare increase on riders.
The riders also won’t have to worry about the MTA completely replacing people with AI-powered smartphones because it’s a legal requirement to conduct human track inspections. Despite the scorching temperatures and an array of surreal occurrences, the New York City Subway has survived for 120 years only because of the 52,000-person army that keeps the system running 24 hours per day, seven days per week.
