From buses to buildings – unifying campus monitoring
Texas A&M University is an academic and athletic powerhouse with an annual enrollment of 70,000 students. As a long-time Genetec customer, the team recently unified onboard bus cameras within Security Center to speed up incident response and investigations.
The company
Texas A&M University opened its doors in 1876 as the first public university in Texas, United States. Today, Texas A&M has become an academic and athletic powerhouse with an annual enrollment of 70,000 students. One-fifth of the student body lives on the College Station main campus, which spans 5,200 acres, while others attend branch campuses located in Galveston and Qatar. Providing a view across one of the largest university campuses in the United States requires a comprehensive approach. That’s why Texas A&M has been a long-standing Genetec customer.
The challenge
Texas A&M had been using Security Center to manage over 930 cameras and 150 doors across campus. Having a more progressive vision for unified campus monitoring, the Transportation Services team asked: ‘Can we unify onboard bus cameras within Security Center too?’ With the old onboard transit solution, they’d have to get buses back to the station to connect to WIFI and find the video in question. If they needed another angle from that scene, they’d then have to log in to Security Center, or another system entirely, to pull more evidence from other campus cameras.
The solution
Unified campus visibility
“Now, our team has a very standardized experience, meaning they do not need to remember multiple logins and passwords or wonder which system has which cameras—they are all in one,” said Williams.
Real-time connectivity
The team no longer has to worry about bringing the bus back to the station for WIFI. Using cellular connectivity, operators can easily access the onboard cameras in real-time.
Easy setup and maintenance
As Genetec-certified users, the team handled a lot of the setup and configuration themselves. Since the system is so intuitive, they are managing all maintenance in-house too.
Built for collaboration
Texas A&M uses bus cameras to support local authorities when something happens in the community. Using the Federation feature, they can share video access with other departments.
“We have one unified camera system now. Our transit operators can remotely retrieve video onboard any bus and access other fixed cameras throughout the campus all using Security Center."
Dell Hamilton, Manager of Transportation Services.
Results
Getting the buses outfitted with the Genetec platform was a team effort. Texas A&M worked closely with Pref-Tech and Genetec as well as two major bus suppliers, Gillig and Proterra, to install Security Center Fleet Monitoring on over 35 new buses. Today, with Security Center onboard the buses, the Transportation Services team is working faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Each bus today has five cameras instead of the original eight. That’s because the Transportation Services team chose Axis Communications 360-degree cameras, which offer more expansive video coverage. Instead of two cameras in the middle and at the front of each bus, they only needed one. An additional two cameras view the outside of each bus and another one faces the roadway.