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Those private businesses are incentivized to make money by ticketing as many people as possible. As long as fighting a ticket is more expensive than paying a ti

by olliej 4y ago

Those private businesses are incentivized to make money by ticketing as many people as possible. As long as fighting a ticket is more expensive than paying a ticket there is no incentive for them to do "a great job". Because the model of all of these systems is that the private "efficient" entity gets a %age of the expenses that they inflict on people, but any cost from subsequent lawsuits are borne by the public.

seti0Cha 4y ago
There are seemingly obvious ways of countering that, such as included mandatory upper limits on ticket contest rates. Are these not part of the contract? Who enters into contracts with no provision for actually delivering the service at an acceptable level?
- olliej 4y ago
  People focus on the dollar amounts for contesting tickets, but more likely the problem is time. If you have a minimum wage job you likely don’t have the time flexibility to allow you to go to any kind of “court” to contest a fine. If you have a high paying job, then likely the time costs you more than what you save - especially if the cost of contesting a fine in capped at something “affordable”. Your other question: what is “acceptable service level” measuring for a ticketing service?
  - seti0Cha 4y ago
    That's the case for government run ticketing as well. Even if only a small percent of people contest unfair tickets, you can use that as an indicator of how many unfair tickets are being issued. If it goes up under private ticketing, and assuming you don't change the method for contesting, the odds are good that they are doing something to cause it. Hence you could write a service level agreement that says something like "Percent of issued tickets which are contested shall not vary beyond x% from y (the prior rate). Percent of successfully contested tickets will not vary beyond z%", etc. To come up with an actual service level agreement would require some knowledge of what outcomes are desired and some thought about how those numbers could be gamed, but I don't see why this is not possible. Private companies contract out work all the time and don't seem helpless in their ability to get what they want from it. Why should the government not be able to do this?
    - olliej 4y ago
      No it's not, that's the point - a private company has a single goal: making money. It isn't in the interest of a company that gets revenue proportional to tickets issued to, for example, ensure that parking restriction signs are visible, etc. A city obviously has _some_ incentive to get more money from tickets (in the US see things like ticket revenue requirements, "civil forfeiture"/theft, distributing the received assets to the orgs issuing the tickets, stealing property, etc). But the city also has actual non-revenue reasons as well - for example I have received multiple parking tickets around my house over the last few years because there are parking restrictions to allow street cleaning, etc (the problem isn't the signage, it's the forgetting about the restrictions, and them being "2nd and 4th Tuesday" on one side of the street and "1st and 3rd Tuesday" on the other). Similarly traffic tickets say are intended to make roads safer by discouraging speeding, etc (although they functionally just mean speeding is allowed if you are rich). Using speeding tickets as an example, it is in the interests of an organization that receives revenue from tickets that people do speed. On the other side various governments have a real interest in not having crashes, etc as that has impact on the economy, it impacts voters, etc. But even this depends on the people enforcing traffic laws not being corrupt - and gov agencies getting any funding from tickets creates an obvious moral hazard. In California at least you get the CHP getting significant funding from ticket/fine revenue, and as a result of this the CHP does not maintain visibility while speed checking, but instead hides. The former results in people not speeding, the latter means that they get to issue tickets. An illogical extreme of this would be to set the speed limit for a freeway below the design speed for said freeway - this is a particularly subtle one: most research shows that people will tend towards driving at the designed speed of a roadway, so you can create an environment where the default behavior is "breaking the law" giving you a limitless source of income. Honestly, it's why things like speeding tickets, etc should be required to have all fines sent to a separate account (say victim support or something) where the relevant agencies can't use the income directly or indirectly. This is why the incredibly hated traffic cameras are infinitely superior to manual speed checking - fixed cameras in locations where speeding is dangerous are, well, fixed. This means that even if people do speed, they learn to avoid speeding in places it's particularly dangerous, if only to avoid guaranteed tickets.
      - 4y ago

by olliej 4y ago

seti0Cha 4y ago

There are seemingly obvious ways of countering that, such as included mandatory upper limits on ticket contest rates. Are these not part of the contract? Who enters into contracts with no provision for actually delivering the service at an acceptable level?

olliej 4y ago
People focus on the dollar amounts for contesting tickets, but more likely the problem is time. If you have a minimum wage job you likely don’t have the time flexibility to allow you to go to any kind of “court” to contest a fine. If you have a high paying job, then likely the time costs you more than what you save - especially if the cost of contesting a fine in capped at something “affordable”. Your other question: what is “acceptable service level” measuring for a ticketing service?
- seti0Cha 4y ago
  That's the case for government run ticketing as well. Even if only a small percent of people contest unfair tickets, you can use that as an indicator of how many unfair tickets are being issued. If it goes up under private ticketing, and assuming you don't change the method for contesting, the odds are good that they are doing something to cause it. Hence you could write a service level agreement that says something like "Percent of issued tickets which are contested shall not vary beyond x% from y (the prior rate). Percent of successfully contested tickets will not vary beyond z%", etc. To come up with an actual service level agreement would require some knowledge of what outcomes are desired and some thought about how those numbers could be gamed, but I don't see why this is not possible. Private companies contract out work all the time and don't seem helpless in their ability to get what they want from it. Why should the government not be able to do this?
  - olliej 4y ago
    No it's not, that's the point - a private company has a single goal: making money. It isn't in the interest of a company that gets revenue proportional to tickets issued to, for example, ensure that parking restriction signs are visible, etc. A city obviously has _some_ incentive to get more money from tickets (in the US see things like ticket revenue requirements, "civil forfeiture"/theft, distributing the received assets to the orgs issuing the tickets, stealing property, etc). But the city also has actual non-revenue reasons as well - for example I have received multiple parking tickets around my house over the last few years because there are parking restrictions to allow street cleaning, etc (the problem isn't the signage, it's the forgetting about the restrictions, and them being "2nd and 4th Tuesday" on one side of the street and "1st and 3rd Tuesday" on the other). Similarly traffic tickets say are intended to make roads safer by discouraging speeding, etc (although they functionally just mean speeding is allowed if you are rich). Using speeding tickets as an example, it is in the interests of an organization that receives revenue from tickets that people do speed. On the other side various governments have a real interest in not having crashes, etc as that has impact on the economy, it impacts voters, etc. But even this depends on the people enforcing traffic laws not being corrupt - and gov agencies getting any funding from tickets creates an obvious moral hazard. In California at least you get the CHP getting significant funding from ticket/fine revenue, and as a result of this the CHP does not maintain visibility while speed checking, but instead hides. The former results in people not speeding, the latter means that they get to issue tickets. An illogical extreme of this would be to set the speed limit for a freeway below the design speed for said freeway - this is a particularly subtle one: most research shows that people will tend towards driving at the designed speed of a roadway, so you can create an environment where the default behavior is "breaking the law" giving you a limitless source of income. Honestly, it's why things like speeding tickets, etc should be required to have all fines sent to a separate account (say victim support or something) where the relevant agencies can't use the income directly or indirectly. This is why the incredibly hated traffic cameras are infinitely superior to manual speed checking - fixed cameras in locations where speeding is dangerous are, well, fixed. This means that even if people do speed, they learn to avoid speeding in places it's particularly dangerous, if only to avoid guaranteed tickets.
    - 4y ago