Video Safety signs bus surveillance deal with MBTA

Strike up the band for Houston-based Safety Vision, a provider of mobile digital video systems that has seen success selling them to public transportation systems such as

Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Portland. The company announced this week that it won a similar $1.4 million contract to install onboard surveillance on 155 buses for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). Partially funded by a DHS grants, the project entails outfitting each new bus with eight digital cameras (five interior, three exterior) connecting them to Safety Vision’s RoadRecorder 6000 PRO MDVR, and hooking up the whole kit and kaboodle to a mobile wireless network. Of these, the latter technology is perhaps the most important: The network enables transmission of live video feed from cameras installed on networked buses to laptops in MBTA police cars — key for threat and disaster management.