After the MTA finish testing their reliablity, could you please put it on board every train in the system. Also, you could you place camera in the stations? It will certainly help reduce crime in the subway and catch does vandalizing subway property.

Why not? It’s good blackmail material. It also invites bribes: if you want to track someone down, you pay a surveillance employee to let you look at tapes of him enter and exit the subway car, so that you’ll know which station he gets off at.

The subway system of Berlin, Germany recently starting rolling out in-train cameras, and they had a scientific study accompany the project. The results were completely clear: The effect of in-train cameras on security and crime rates is zero. Not small, not very small, but absolutely zero. The cameras were shown to reduce crime not at all, not even a little during the one-year study.

The BVG continued the camera project anyway and tried to keep the study from being published. They now argue that the cameras will at least help people “feel” safer.

Similar results are available from London, UK.

Security cameras are useless.

The first thing a vandal will do is spraypaint the camera lens.

It’s hard to imagine this system producing anything useful. I can only see baneful ends… Big Brother’s encroaching, ever-watchful eye upon us.

The test should make sure that the cameras are positioned in the right place, make sure that you don’t get fuzzy video, or none at all, and that the images can be viewed or recorded according to plan. It might also serve as a benchmark for how much recording capacity they need.

If it actually stops crime on two cars, or even more outrageous, if a new employee is hired to simply monitor two cars’ worth of video, I’ll be shocked.

Oh, and the L is using R160s? I thought they were all R143s.