Hayden AI wins 2026 Merit Award for Smart City Technology

SAN FRANCISCO — Hayden AI, the leading provider of vehicle-mounted automated enforcement solutions for public transit, has won the Smart Cities and Urban Infrastructure Award from the 2026 Merit Awards for Technology. Hayden AI helps cities improve safety, public transit performance, and transportation accessibility with automated transit zone and bike lane enforcement technology. The company’s mobile vision AI platform is installed on over 2,500 transit buses and parking enforcement vehicles in 10 major cities in the United States, including New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

“When we founded Hayden AI in 2019, our vision was to build an AI-powered operating system for cities, starting with a critical urban mobility challenge: making public transportation faster and more reliable,” said Vaibhav Ghadiok, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Hayden AI. “What makes our work especially meaningful is that our technology must navigate the complexities of the physical world at city scale. By combining spatial AI with edge intelligence, we’re transforming vehicles into intelligent sensors that help cities better understand and manage their streets. We’re building this technology with privacy and security at its core. I’m incredibly proud of the team that has made this possible and honored to receive this recognition from the Merit Awards.”

Vehicle-mounted camera enforcement is proven to change driver behavior and keep dedicated transit zones clear of illegally parked vehicles, improving transit on-time performance, accessibility, and safety. In Philadelphia, bus speeds on routes enforced with Hayden AI technology increased by 3 to 6% – in just eight months since automated enforcement began – while speeds on non-enforced routes decreased. In Santa Monica, there were 67% fewer bus lane parking violations and 40% fewer bus stop parking violations detected in March 2026 than in July 2025, when the automated bus lane and bus stop enforcement program began.

About Hayden AI: Hayden AI powers safer, smarter, and more efficient cities. We combine advanced vision AI with purpose-built, vehicle-mounted hardware to analyze urban environments in real time. Cities use our technology to make streets safer and improve transit performance for everyone. Learn more at www.hayden.ai