Cameras on Metro Transit Buses

HRM wants to get more people to ride the bus: this is not the way to do it. They're already bad, and commuting to work in a car means you have air conditioning and your choice of music, and you aren't cramped in with strangers and people that haven't washed in days or weeks. There's also no need to put up with rude, arrogant idiots who think their bags are entitled to a separate seat.

Very little could make me want to ride the bus less than it does now, but along comes the drive for cameras on Metro Transit, and a camera pointed straight at my face is one of the last things I'd want to put up with. I put up with it for over a decade in the public school system: I'm not doing so now.

Of course, the purpose of *those* cameras was to capture video evidence so that the target of any gang beating could be suspended and/or expelled on the off chance that there happened to be a camera in the box that day. This is different, at least in principle. But a bus-mounted camera never made me feel more secure, only less so.

Cameras in general do that... particularly cameras operated by government agencies, since they can more easily implement centralized monitoring. Hell, in Britain, the government even has CCTV cameras that can yell at you if you're 'acting suspiciously'.

I think the only way to make taking the bus more annoying and inconvenient would be to operate it in a manner similar to maximum-security prisoner transport vehicles where the passengers are handcuffed and shackled into place. That would also make it more secure, wouldn't it?

I think what bothered me most was that HRM is in such a rush to deploy them. Tell me how a camera would have stopped the Greyhound bus beheader [warning: graphic descriptions] from doing his thing? There's no deterring antisocial psychopaths.