The New York City Subway Is Using Google Pixels to Listen for Track Defects
WiredBetween September and January, six Google Pixel smartphones hitched free rides on four New York City subway cars. The phones were part of a brief experiment by New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Google into whether cheap, mostly off-the-shelf technology could supplement the agency’s track inspection work. Today, inspections are carried out by human inspectors, who together walk all 665 miles of New York City’s subway tracks, eyes peeled for problems like broken rails, busted signals, and water damage. New York City Transit’s work with the experimental technology, which Google calls TrackInspect, suggests that audio, vibration, and location data, collected relatively cheaply and used to train artificial intelligence prediction models, can supplement that inspection work.
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