Public Transportation Safety Enhanced by Spanish Monitoring System

The Municipal Transport Company of Madrid (EMT) has set itself a bold target, planing to become Europe’s best public transport company. The company has already started to make efforts in accomplishing this goal, as its latest project involves the installation of over 9,000 surveillance cameras in 2,300 buses.

The 20 million euro project will include the fitting of a complex safety monitoring system on the company’s buses. This includes the aforementioned cameras, a GPS system for each bus and a centralization system, called the EMT Central Alarm Center. This is a control center that responds to emergencies signaled by each bus’ panic button and is linked to the city’s official emergency services.

The project, which offers real time high resolution recording, has already been initiated: 400 buses have received the system. The rest of the fleet will be entered in the program by the end of the year. Each bus will be monitored through three 800x600dpi cameras supplied by Axis Communications.

“For this pioneering project, it has been very important to be able to rely on a camera vendor such as Axis Communications, which has demonstrated a proven ability to support its customers closely. Axis took full account of our previous experience with onboard video surveillance and the specifications of the bus fleet. The network cameras are ideally suited to our project's objectives, and we believe that, in view of the similarities between urban bus transport systems, they could be well-suited to the majority of transport systems in Spain, or the world." said Ignacio Uria, Head of EMT’s Security Department.