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AI-powered cameras installed on Metro buses to ticket illegally parked cars
- rokkitmensch 2y agoWhat about programmatic speed ticketing? Either we care to enforce these laws impartially or we want to use them to give cops the ability to exercise their discretion, tertium non datur.
- RecycledEle 2y agoWhat about posting all police body camera videos at the end of the day and offering 50% of the fine collected from the cop to anyone who can spot a violation of policy or of law? What's good for one is good for all.
- mistrial9 2y agoLatin phrase to support an argument for pure law and order -- parody gold
- rokkitmensch 2y agoI think that you've cottoned on to my sometimes oblique humor!
- joshuahaglund 2y agoThere is a pilot program that took effect January 1 but the cameras aren't expected to be on until this summer or later https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/speed-cameras-coming-to-la-glendale-and-long-beach/3299230/ https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/speed-cameras-comin...
- starfleet_bop 2y agoThere’s nothing inherently dangerous about driving fast if it’s in accordance with driving to the conditions on the road. Driving too slowly is more likely to cause an accident by impeding the flow of traffic.
- s09dfhks 2y agoWhat are the chances the video feed is just being sent to India like Amazon’s “just walk out” technology
- whiplash451 2y agoLikely. But if the company providing the service is caught in an audit not implementing the data retention policies that are in the contract, they are dead on the spot.
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y agoThat’s the future CEO’s problem.
- whiplash451 2y agoIANAL but I believe the CEO is liable even if/after they left the company.
- jvm___ 2y agoAPI - Actually People in India
- iancmceachern 2y agoNot even India, it's just piped into all our capchas
- truthwhisperer 2y ago[dead]
- monero-xmr 2y agoWhy is this AI? License plate scanning technology has been around for decades. Toll booths use them everywhere.
- allpaca 2y agoBecause it's trendy, obviously.
- delfinom 2y agoAI is the new marketing buzzword. Got to label everything as AI. If you think about, AI are just linear regressions on steroids. So we could start selling graphing calculators as having AI even.
- lukevp 2y agoAnd what are movies except for coordinated, flashing lights and a paper cone being shaken real fast?
- VS1999 2y agoWho knows, although the main idea is that there are now cameras on the busses recording 24/7 looking for violations and emailing them to the local police department.
- PeterisP 2y agoFor starters, you need to determine which cars are actually parked, and if that spot is violating the rules. For fixed cameras generally the installation process just marks as spot or lane where every car "counts", but a camera on a moving bus needs to do that on its own.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pompino 2y agocouldn’t that be done off-line? The active system would just collect the data, plate number, GPS, etc., and the off-line system would process it with a overlay of the city map, etc.
- paganel 2y agoDystopic world we're living in, and many of us here on this very forum have helped built it.
- aaronbrethorst 2y agoMy favorite part of 1984 was about the well-maintained public transit infrastructure of Oceania, and how all of the inner party members who broke traffic laws received parking tickets.
- aaronbrethorst 2y agoI've been thinking about the description of these traffic tickets as "dystopian" more today than I'd like to admit. Something about it has really bothered me and I finally think I know what. I would argue that this is actually _utopian_: fair and equal treatment under the law, whether you are the NYPD Commissioner or the Mayor, Black or white, gay or straight, male or female—if you are parked in an illegal spot, you'll get a ticket in the mail.
- paganel 2y ago> fair and equal treatment under the law That assumes that the "law" in general is fair and not favouring the current hegemonic societal consensus, which is definitely not the case. What people fail to see, or fail to want to see, is that the hoi polloi, the "poors", the "plebs", in many cases had to resort to actually breaking the law here and there in order to make their world a little bit more equal. These types of laws and the way that they are now applied will actively prohibit that in the future, in effect making this a less fair/less equal world (yes, I'm saying that in many instances actually breaking the existing law makes the world fairer for a big chunk of the population). I'm saying that more probably there was a bigger percentage of Tesla owners paying their parking tickets compared to clunker owners doing the same, so that this law (written and most especially applied in the spirit of the world inhabited by those Tesla owners) will in effect disproportionately affect the "poors"/"plebs" a lot more.
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- nox101 2y agowish they'd ticket traffic violators, not just parked cars. Cars running red lights, cars driving in lanes they aren't supposed to be in. Cars turning in places that are illegal to turn at. Cars speeding. Cars stopped in crosswalks. I see these daily. I'm happy to submit camera footage if it means tickets and enforcement.
- neilv 2y agoSome intersections in the Boston area, there seems to be a de facto rule of "3 cars through after it turns red". If someone miscalculates and ends up blocking the box, they'll get honked at, but they still get to their destination faster. If they hit someone who had a green or walk signal, I don't know what happens to them, but it doesn't seem to be enough of a deterrent.
- estebank 2y ago> they still get to their destination faster I'd love any evidence of that and I'd wager that that statement is wrong. Blocking the box only accomplishes slowing down the cross traffic with no benefit to the person doing the blocking.
- toast0 2y agoI don't know about Boston, but I think there's no question blocking the box in isolation gets you there faster, although the difference may not be meaningful. If the exit moves shortly after you blocked, you may have saved the time between when you got to move and when the light you should have stopped for turns green. If it's a long cycle, this could be meaningful, although it may depend on bottlenecks elsewhere in your path. If the exit remains blocked until after your light cycles, you still saved the time it takes to cross over half the intersection. This probably isn't meaningful. Of course, if your blocking of boxes actually blocks a traffic move that would unblock your exit, that's not good. And if blocking becomes common, it causes confusion and delay for everyone.
- nox101 2y agoIIRC NYC make blocking the box a fine and 2 points (so approximately $4k) and apparently enforce it. No idea how effective it's been
- londons_explore 2y agoDo they really need 100 cameras? Just 5 cameras driving about the city all day ought to catch enough violators that anyone habitually parked in a bus lane will be caught and will stop doing it. I could understand 1 camera per route maybe if the busses physically always stay on the same route.
- ankit219 2y agoWhen i read these implementations, one thing I think about is the British post office scandal, also known as Horizon IT scandal[1]. These technologies are probabilistic with some nonzero chances of error which can't always be easily detected. These are implemented by people with some knowledge of the tech used (and hopefully the understanding of error), but are to be used by people who expect the output to be 100% true. I do not know how they would deal with tech errors which do not look like errors, but feel like there should be more cognizance about this and expectations should be set accordingly. Same goes for any facial recognition tech deployed by authorities. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
- pompino 2y agohow does it compare versus human error?
- lolinder 2y agoWhat the exact error rate is isn't relevant to OP's concern, which is that operators of the tooling will treat it as having a 0% error rate in a way that they don't with human judgment. We've already seen this play out with algorithms designed to predict recidivism or what have you—law enforcement and judicial officials place undue weight on the outputs of algorithms and trust them implicitly where they might ask questions of a human expert.
- acdha 2y ago> which is that operators of the tooling will treat it as having a 0% error rate in a way that they don't with human judgment This is possible but we have decades of camera enforcement experience suggesting that courts are aware that these systems are not as reliable as the manufacturers claim. People have been challenging photo tickets since the previous century and there’s a well-established process for challenging them.
- antegamisou 2y agoTechbros always love citing the supposedly devastating human fallibility yet experience shows poorly configured/developed automated systems are much more of a concern.
- schutt 2y agoAnzeigenhauptmeister just lost his Hobby :(
- nashashmi 2y agoLA is so late to the game. NYC already does this and they do it without AI. Buses have cams. Anyone who drives in bus only lanes gets a ticket. Any cars parked in bus stops get tickets and a whole lot of honking.
- bradleyjg 2y agoThe big problem with all this automated enforcement is they only end up punishing honest people. Kind of like continually raising fares while doing zero about fare evasion. The police should crack down hard on: license plate covers, fake license plates, fake temporary plates, etc. I suggest seizing the vehicles as contraband. Then I might support more automated enforcement. Until then, I don’t.
- acdha 2y agoThis is a “do both” situation: those “honest people” are still knowingly trying to cheat their neighbors, so while they pose less of a threat individually than the people with fake plates the aggregate cost is quite high due to greater numbers, and fining them is done by a separate group of people so it doesn’t take any resources away from the police you need to go after the hardened criminals. Cameras actively help that process, too, because they collect data showing how widespread the problem is and individual fake plates will collect tickets showing how dangerous those particular drivers are.
- kouru225 2y agoYou could say this about all enforcement. In the exact same way that organized crime is driven to tax evasion, petty crime is driven to fake license plates etc. That’s not necessary a bad thing.
- chaos_emergent 2y agoLet’s say that the city of LA theorizes that enforcement of parking via these cameras will be cash flow positive; assuming the $11M contract size, 100 cameras and 5 years at face value you’d expect each device to bring in $60/day to break even. Seems like a good deal for the city if they fine someone at least twice a day per device.
- toast0 2y agoThere are benefit for the city and its people if this encouages compliance, even if it doesn't pay for itself. How much would you pay to clear parked cars from bus stops and bus lanes? That's going to improve route times... Although how much of a difference it makes, and how much of a difference is worth $11M, I don't know.
- duxup 2y agoI’m all for requiring a human to give out tickets of all or any kind.
- PeterisP 2y agoThis is exactly what's being proposed - quoting the article, "Once a recording is made, it will be submitted to L.A. Department of Transportation where a human will assess whether a ticket should be issued." In any case, neither the camera company nor the bus company have any authority to issue tickets, all they can do is submit complaints+evidence to the appropriate institution.
- duxup 2y agoI'd rather they be onsite, that's what I was thinking.
- PeterisP 2y agoThis is the type of prohibition which we want to enforce because they disturb others, and it would be inappropriate to disturb the illegitimately disturbed person even more by having to stop their activities and wait for some official to resolve the problem. If a car is blocking a bus stop, the harm is done even if the car leaves before some official arrives to write a ticket, and it seems reasonable that the bus operator should be able to request that the law gets enforced without having to stay on the spot and point out the violation to someone - we do want a deterrent effect towards any would-be violators, that they should fear a ticket even if there are no officials onsite, and perhaps not do the prohibited thing.
- duxup 2y agoIf you can't get someone to the bus stop to write a ticket, that's a question of resources. I see no reason that getting someone there is some insurmountable task and thus requires a completely different solution.
- iaseiadit 2y agoI'm of the belief that if a law exists but isn't being enforced, the only correct course of action is to eliminate the law or start enforcing it. Otherwise, you enforce the law inconsistently, and you reinforce the notion that laws don't need to be followed. Technology can help with consistent enforcement. Stop light cameras, in my experience, are more impartial and objective than police officers. Where I live in the U.S., crime is prevalent. Many laws are flouted by criminals and rarely enforced by the police or district attorneys. The system has become a farce. It's better to enforce the laws consistently, or if they're not needed, to eliminate them.
- flawsofar 2y agolook up “broken windows policing”
- iaseiadit 2y agoI'm familiar. Completely transformed New York City in the 1990s for the better. But I'm not suggesting that every law is good. If a law is not enforceable or not a net positive for the community, change it or get rid of it. But don't enforce it inconsistently, and don't apply it to certain people and not others depending on the whims of the police and the district attorneys and their personal predilections and politics.
- WalterBright 2y agoThe idea is to keep unenforced laws on the books, so they can be selectively enforced against one's political enemies.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoDoesn't really scale well. What you're looking for is community-led policing combined with sensible, few surprises, high community-visibility and -participation legislative processes rather than revenue-led or self-led policing.
- throwaway22032 2y agoThere are now CCTV vehicles driving around some boroughs of London scanning for parked cars. I strongly believe that this breaks the spirit of the law as it was originally conceived and implemented. In most areas, local residents allowed for and voted for controlled parking zones primarily to prevent commuters or tourists parking all day/week and to reduce things like car storage by dealerships. Basically, to ensure that parking was actually available for residents, to make the best of a scarce resource. I don't believe that the intent was ever to penalise someone parking for 15-30 minutes to have a coffee or to shop, to drop off parcels, to make tradesmen have to pay to park when working, etc. Perfect enforcement is punitive, and reduces the utility of the road network overall. My personal opinion is that these surveillance schemes are radicalising a lot of people and turning them against their elected officials. Discretion fosters trust in power.
- kouru225 2y agoThis is such a public transit power move
- someonehere 2y ago“ Once a recording is made, it will be submitted to L.A. Department of Transportation where a human will assess whether a ticket should be issued.” I’m seeing too many comments jumping to conclusions before reading this paragraph. A human will check the footage and make a final call