The Importance of Situational Awareness in Preventing Transportation Threats

SUMMARY

• Transportation systems face growing risks—including vandalism, theft, cyberattacks, and terrorism—that threaten safety and efficiency.
• Situational awareness is essential for detecting threats early and preventing crime across highways, depots, ports, and transit hubs.
• Modern surveillance strengthens security by closing blind spots, providing real-time monitoring, and supporting rapid response.‍
• LVT’s mobile security units deliver flexibility, scalability, and AI-powered analytics to keep transportation networks safe and reliable.

Depending on where you live, there’s a good chance that you have at least one or two methods of getting from point A to point B (and we’re not talking about parkour—though, we’re not ruling it out as a possibility either). Many own cars, some choose to “go green” and ride a bike to work, and a plethora of people live in cities and towns spiderwebbed with networks of bus routes and train tracks. For longer trips, ships and airplanes transport hordes to and fro with incredible efficiency. 

As cities become more crowded and the need for travel grows, these avenues for transit become ever more complex, as do the security threats they face. The dangers lurking in the dark corners of parking lots and between the towers of shipping containers on freight ships require sharper, more attentive countermeasures. 

Situational awareness—the ability to understand an environment in real time and identify potential threats—is key to maintaining security in any industry, but is especially crucial in transportation settings. In this article, we’ll examine the critical role of situational awareness in mitigating security risks on the road, along the rails, or anywhere people are moving. 

Safe and Reliable Transportation: A Vital Mission 

Our highways, airports, bus stations, shipyards, and other such spots are essential fixtures of our society. These hubs of transit, exchange, and commerce facilitate important activities and transport men, women, and children from place to place. Safe transportation is paramount to our ability to meet, connect, trade, and thrive. 

Transportation agencies can ensure the security of these vital spaces by staying situationally aware and employing a full security strategy, complete with modern surveillance. 

Transportation and Situational Awareness

What is situational awareness? This fundamental security principle refers to the proactive monitoring of your properties and processes, so you can detect suspicious happenings before they escalate into damage and crime. 

In transportation, methods of achieving situational awareness include the surveillance of dense and high-traffic locations, entrances, exits, sensitive areas, valuable freight, and other risk-prone spots. Situationally aware transportation security leaders keep a close eye on the gaps left by traditional security measures—such as a lapse in attention from police or guards on a vulnerable site, or a blind spot in security camera coverage—and quickly fill them, so nothing sinister slips by undetected.

The Usual Suspects: Primary Threats Facing Transportation Agencies 

While every mode of transportation carries risks, certain threats have evolved into major issues in the modern age:

• Vandalism
• Unauthorized access 
• Trespassing 
• Theft
• Cyber-attacks
• Terrorism

In the ever-changing, fluid environments of the transportation industry, threats match their surroundings with incredible mobility and dynamism. New car parts become desirable on the black market and attract thieves to parking lots. Hackers hone their cyber-attacks on agency databases and extract travelers’ personal information with precision. New acts of mass violence shock the world from the TV screen, as terrorists devise new ways to cause chaos, pain, and death in crowded hubs such as airports and train stations. 

Using Situational Awareness to Prevent Threats 

Whether you manage a bus depot or monitor state freeways, you must maintain good situational awareness to create a safe environment for all. To this end, your security efforts should include surveillance cameras, smart video analytics, access control, and any other method of security that makes sense for your site. Seeing the whole picture—and spotting the threats you need to mitigate early on—is vital to preventing crime, and even tragedy, on your property.

When you invest in security solutions that fit together to protect your site from every side, you can prevent crime, foster public trust in your operation, ensure the efficiency and compliance of your staff and infrastructure, and improve the overall safety of your commuters and employees. 

The Role of Surveillance 

Whether you lead a large staff of security professionals or you’re a team of one keeping the peace, chances are that you don’t have enough eyes to watch every square foot of your property or infrastructure, every second of the day. Surveillance can deepen your situational awareness, enhancing your ability to validate and respond to threats in a timely manner. 

Of course, when we discuss the power of surveillance technology to strengthen situational awareness, we’re not merely talking about the grainy, black-and-white CCTV cameras of yesteryear. While even the more ancient hardware can provide a decent view of parts of your site, these static solutions simply aren’t sufficient to match a modern onslaught of physical and digital threats.

The cutting-edge surveillance technology of today—the most noteworthy being the mobile security units and other transportation security solutions pioneered by LiveView Technologies (LVT)—can identify suspicious activity and patterns in a proactive and revolutionary way. These systems’ array of state-of-the-art features helps to improve safety, limit liability, and preserve the public’s trust in your transportation service. In the case of the LVT system, these features include, but are not limited to:

• Scalability 
• Mobility 
• Rapid deployment 
• High-resolution cameras 
• Solar power 
• Low-light visibility 
• Cloud storage 
• Remote video management and access 
• Full integration with other security tools
• AI-powered analytics
• Protection from cyberattacks 

Investing in a modern surveillance system will empower you with a real-time view of your transit system, and mobile security systems can bring that power to even the most complex and remote sites.

On the Street: Real-World Scenarios 

Countless transportation agencies rely on surveillance technology from companies like LVT to keep crime away and protect the crucial processes they facilitate. Whether it’s monitoring a distribution center’s blind spots for theft and insider crime, protecting a roadside construction site, or watching for pickpockets in a cramped subway station at rush hour, surveillance is a more than worthwhile investment in situational awareness and overall safety. 

Keep Things Moving with LVT

Our society and economy run on complex, interconnected systems of transportation. Threats to these essential institutions are inevitable, but they can be avoided with the help of advanced security solutions. 

Situational awareness is the driving principle behind effective crime prevention. You and your staff can stay situationally aware—and secure people, vehicles, and infrastructure—by employing customizable transportation security solutions from LVT. Schedule a demo today and discover our flexible, advanced transportation security solutions.