7 ms·

MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

87 points by croes 2y ago

meta_x_ai 2y ago
If you prevent government from launching technologies for every software bug / mistake, you will get a bloated government which will do everything manually increasing it's cost to taxpayers and decrease in quality of services. The key is still to launch fast and iterate over bugs especially in the realm of traffic / parking violations which at the most causes annoyances to people ( I mean the same people are willing to sit in front of Holland Tunnel for an hour )
- devmor 2y ago
  Seems like the premise you’re going with here is a false dichotomy. There’s no reason this project had to issue parking violations from launch - it could issue soft warnings and get the same feedback from impacted civilians to fix the issues before causing them undue distress.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    That seemed to be the plan, but the city or contracting company was too incompetent to pull it off.
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    > The cameras also failed to realize that both the M79 and Bx35 bus routes were still in the “warning” phase of a new enforcement pattern – which means even legitimate infractions should not have resulted in monetary penalties.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Maybe government tries to do too much.
  - qqqult 2y ago
    bingo
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Okay. Do you drive? Would you support bounties for ordinary people to enforce parking?
    - ta1243 2y ago
      I suspect they want the roads to be private and then have a major corporation with no accountability issue the charges You can always vote with your wallet and not use that corporation's roads
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Would you support bounties for ordinary people to enforce parking? Honestly, why not? Let people take a photo of the offending vehicle, picture of the license plate and VIN number and tag the violation. Submit with a copy of your New York ID, and use that to filter out spam and nonsense reporters. Hell, pay a bounty for submissions that result in the city collecting a fine. (You can deduct bad submissions from said bounties.)
      - freejazz 2y ago
        Do you park in NYC? I don't think a single photograph is going to convey sufficient information to make it clear that someone is violating parking rules, many of which are temporal. I think it would also be weird to penalize people for reports that were ultimately un-actionable. Can you point to any government function that has a similar mechanism?
        loeg 2y ago
        > I don't think a single photograph is going to convey sufficient information Seems like the obvious solution is: multiple photos! > Can you point to any government function that has a similar mechanism? https://www.motortrend.com/news/nyc-idling-fine-citizen-reporting-bounty/ https://www.motortrend.com/news/nyc-idling-fine-citizen-repo...
- myhf 2y ago
  No amount of automation will have any significant effect on the size or efficiency of a bureaucracy. http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...
- akira2501 2y ago
  > you will get a bloated government which will do everything manually Like creating useless bus lanes? Then creating useless programs to write tickets to those "parked illegally" in bus lanes? Then creating useless digital waste finding a "better way" to write these pointless tickets over a pointless lane? > The key is still to launch fast The key is to get rid of things that don't work and can't provide worthwhile value to the _majority_ of tax payers.
  - mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
    The bus lanes are not useless, they have measurably improved commutes, and parking in them is in fact illegal, so why the air quotes?
    - akira2501 2y ago
      > they have measurably improved commutes By how much? 1%, 5%... or? It's measured so what's the measurement? > and parking in them is in fact illegal And all you have to prove this is a snapshot. Which are not accurate and is the basis for the entire thread here. And people who didn't commit any crime have been charged. So there is clearly an open question as to how many of these pictures appear to be illegal versus how many actually are. > so why the air quotes? Those are actual quotes and you've projected your assumptions into my actions. Did it harm your ability to understand what I wrote? If not then why make an issue of it?
      - markemer 2y ago
        They meant scare quotes. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scare%20quotes https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scare%20quotes While they may be “quotes” of stuff from the original (which that technically was) the intent was clear.
    - potato3732842 2y ago
      Measurable and positive does not mean worthwhile. (Though I suspect that many bus lanes are in fact worthwhile but that's beside the point.) Furthermore, there's always someone who benefits and will lie with statistics to keep the gravy going.
xnx 2y ago
Despite the "A.I." in the headline, the source of the errors seems to be bad categorical data input and nothing AI related. The same problem likely could've happened with human traffic enforcement if they were given the wrong instructions.
- jejfjfjfjsj 2y ago
  In some German cities, bus driver simply hit a camera button when actually being blocked. Sounds like a good filter for this use case?
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    That seems like a far superior solution.
    - soco 2y ago
      Unless you're on the hype train "all things AI". It's always surprising how many real life problems do not necessarily need a solution based on the buzzwords du jour. All things blockchain, all things microservices, all things as-a-service, all those came and went, washing off the bubbles and leaving behind the (fewer) worthy pieces.
      - woodruffw 2y ago
        Buzzwords aside, I'm pretty sure the MTA's license recognition here is plain old ALPR, of the kind that's already been in use for municipal fare/toll enforcement for ~15 years.
  - xvedejas 2y ago
    This is also how it works in San Francisco (SFMTA Muni buses)
- croes 2y ago
  Bad training data is pretty much AI related. People outside AI research expect good answers no matter what you give to AI. Or to put it that way, wrong instructions are still natural intelligence related
lofatdairy 2y ago
I mean I still think this is a good idea. Seems like a combination of poor communication and probably an incomplete understanding of edge cases but illegal parking is a huge problem in NYC and even though there's a snitching program I think the scale can't be addressed without some level of automation. Obviously there are concerns with these sorts of things like misuse of data and whatnot but I don't think we're living in 1984 just because red light cameras exist.
rgovostes 2y ago
When I lived in California years ago I had a custom 2-letter plate. I gave the car to a relative who switched its registration to another state. Years later, I got a toll demand from an express lane around LA that had a false positive scan of my plate number—someone else’s partially obscured maybe? I argued the car was registered elsewhere and wasn’t driven in CA, and they denied the appeal. I asked for evidence but they refused. I tried a FOIA request but it was denied because there’s an exemption for data that reveals individuals’ driving patterns—to get the photo I would have had to show up at an office in LA to show my ID and registration to prove it was my car, which it wasn’t! CA law allows the plate scanning and dictates the toll violation letter must show the make and model of the vehicle in question. They just look up the DMV records for the scanned plate. They’re not doing any kind of verification that the vehicle matches. They have 100% faith in the infallibility of these scanners with no appeals process.
- pcl 2y ago
  Have you sent this note along to your state assembly representative and state senator? https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/ https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/
  - rgovostes 2y ago
    I don't have a representative because I don't live in CA. I did contact one of the elected officials that oversees the Orange County Transportation Authority and their office did eventually get it dismissed.
- ewoodrich 2y ago
  Interesting how different our experiences were in a similar situation. I had a false positive FasTrak ticket from the San Diego area for a timeframe I was living in Sacramento that was tossed (including gigantic late penalties) after a phone call explaining I was at work hundreds of miles away at the time. I was all ready to go with Google Maps Timeline location data but they just took me at my word when they saw where the car was registered.
  - 2y ago
mistrial9 2y ago
in other recent news, the Alameda County Transit system has enabled "AI" cameras on busses, that will auto-generate violations for civilian vehicles in the bus stop, in the new fast transit dedicated lanes, and who knows where else. In previous times, Alameda County special officers would issue $500 tickets for letting a passenger out of a private vehicle within a bus stop area. In case you don't know, the bus stops are everywhere, and often are large in busy downtown areas. The joke was that these special officers wore gold braids on their uniform, not to mark seniority, but to mark the amount of money generated !! Witnesses saw four or more tickets given out like that in one hour in a busy downtown area, on a certain day more than ten years ago. To be blunt, tickets of that value, generated automatically for common violations, is a money printing machine. Alameda County Transit in California cannot be the only ones implementing this across the US and elsewhere.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  the point of the cameras, to some degree, is to make the common violations stop happening. you don't really have a right to pull over anywhere you want in 'a busy downtown area'.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    That's not really a compelling argument in a reality in which we allow people to just stop at the end of merge ramps because "whoops, poor/no planning".
    - bobthepanda 2y ago
      Does one illegal or bad thing make another illegal thing okay? Why bother having any sort of laws or enforcement?
  - BobaFloutist 2y ago
    That's true, though I would argue that, especially around regional transit hubs, at least some number of parking spaces should be converted to pickup/drop-off spaces (3/5/10 minute parking). It's inane how hard it is to find a legal place to drop people off at some BART stations, and surely it's worth sacrificing some small number of parking spots for?
woodruffw 2y ago
I think the title and lede overstate this a bit: it was 2 bus lines (out of >300 in the NYCT system), and of the ~3800 violations issued, under 25% were incorrect. That's still unacceptable, of course. But the proximate error here appears to not be with incorrect recognition, but with training/monitoring data accidentally being redirected to enforcement.
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago
  It's actually much less bad than that. From the video at the top of the article: • The cameras issued 3,000 tickets which "should have been warnings." • The cameras issued 800 tickets for "no infraction at all". So out of 3,800 improperly issued tickets (!), under 25% went to people who were legally parked. The other 75% went to people who broke the law but should have been let off with a warning. As a bus rider, I don't feel so bad for them tbqh. I don't think we know the total number of properly issued tickets from these cameras, but it's likely much higher! > According to the New York City Department of Transportation, the city’s automated cameras – including red light cameras, speed cameras, and bus lane cameras – issue more than 40,000 violations per day. That includes many more types of cameras, but it's also per day!
- cute_boi 2y ago
  even 1% would be unacceptable and should always be manually reviewed. It is too much hassle to report etc..
impish9208 2y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42254668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42254668
ziptron 2y ago
> pay a second company $58 million to outfit an additional 1,000 buses with mobile camera systems How could it be $58k per bus to install a camera?
- Rebelgecko 2y ago
  I imagine the actual cameras are a relatively small part of the overall price
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    also keep in mind this is automotive grade stuff in relatively harsh conditions (the front of a bus); it needs to be more rugged than your average camera
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      Surely it's just a dash cam with a button and maybe some kind of comms module. There are many mass-market dashcams with a 'record' button that saves a time period before and after pressing the button, it's pretty standard usage. The only new thing is sending the video on, and making sure the time/location are correct (many cameras do this via GPS already - standard usage). I'm not seeing what is so expensive or unique. Very profitable by the sounds of it!!!
      - krapht 2y ago
        I have doubts this is actually that profitable. More likely the company is rolling their labor overhead into the per-camera pricing. It's a small order too, only 1000 cameras.
      - bobthepanda 2y ago
        A bus goes through many more miles and hours of operation than the vast majority of cars. Most cars are parked for the vast majority of the day, and sometimes in covered garages. And how long do those cameras last? The feds only fund bus replacements at twelve years or 500,000 miles.
jmspring 2y ago
Some years back Santa Cruz updated the meter maids / parking enforcement to GPS enabled smart devices and they would still drive around, get out, take pictures (when someone was in violation). My wife and I were sitting outside a restaurant where such a vehicle was being photo'd. This particular meter person was known to be .. not nice. While said person was behind vehicle (old vw bus) and out of site of the meter, we slipped a couple of quarters in and got back to our seat. Watching the reaction (they already had a couple of photos) was priceless. Said person questioned about 3 different groups (myself included) and all played dumb and had a good laugh when done. The vehicle owner saw the interaction from the farmer's market across the way and bought a round for a couple of tables. Santa Cruz has a history of meter scofflawism - https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/mr-twister-s-mission-of-mercy-meter-feeding-3019706.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/mr-twister-s-mission-of-...
- potato3732842 2y ago
  I know someone who deflated the tires on their Jeep to get around a violation ticket for bumper height (i.e. the kind of thing they only ever enforce as a pretext for fishing). He asked the cop to re-measure. Cop was confused and mad.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    It's amazing how mechanized scofflaws believe they are uniquely above the law, and that dodging law enforcement is a personal victory. I think it's a sad commentary on the deterioration of public behavior in America (and this is almost exclusively an American thing ... in Germany a lifted Jeep would be seized and destroyed on its first day on the road.)
    - potato3732842 2y ago
      >It's amazing how mechanized scofflaws believe they are uniquely above the law, and that dodging law enforcement is a personal victory. I think it's a sad commentary on the deterioration of public behavior in America (and this is almost exclusively an American thing ... in Germany a lifted Jeep would be seized and destroyed on its first day on the road.) Don't be obtuse. It's not about the mechanization. It's about the capricious enforcement. If you weren't so blinded by bias you'd see that. I hope you get dogpiled for jaywalking or some other "we only ever enforce it as a pretext" violation. It might knock your moral compass back into calibration.
jareklupinski 2y ago
xkcd's foolproof license plate: https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/
pjmlp 2y ago
Welcome to Minority Report reality, fun times ahead.
ninalanyon 2y ago
Sure the cameras don't issue the fines? But even if they do it's actually a human or a group of humans who are responsible regardless of the actual workflow. Describing it as if the AI is responsible is both clickbait and tends to absolve the humans involved. Allowing the MTA to frame it in this way is a failure of journalism.

87 points by croes 2y ago

If you prevent government from launching technologies for every software bug / mistake, you will get a bloated government which will do everything manually increasing it's cost to taxpayers and decrease in quality of services. The key is still to launch fast and iterate over bugs especially in the realm of traffic / parking violations which at the most causes annoyances to people ( I mean the same people are willing to sit in front of Holland Tunnel for an hour )

devmor 2y ago
Seems like the premise you’re going with here is a false dichotomy. There’s no reason this project had to issue parking violations from launch - it could issue soft warnings and get the same feedback from impacted civilians to fix the issues before causing them undue distress.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  That seemed to be the plan, but the city or contracting company was too incompetent to pull it off.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  > The cameras also failed to realize that both the M79 and Bx35 bus routes were still in the “warning” phase of a new enforcement pattern – which means even legitimate infractions should not have resulted in monetary penalties.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
SoftTalker 2y ago
Maybe government tries to do too much.
- qqqult 2y ago
  bingo
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  Okay. Do you drive? Would you support bounties for ordinary people to enforce parking?
  - ta1243 2y ago
    I suspect they want the roads to be private and then have a major corporation with no accountability issue the charges You can always vote with your wallet and not use that corporation's roads
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Would you support bounties for ordinary people to enforce parking? Honestly, why not? Let people take a photo of the offending vehicle, picture of the license plate and VIN number and tag the violation. Submit with a copy of your New York ID, and use that to filter out spam and nonsense reporters. Hell, pay a bounty for submissions that result in the city collecting a fine. (You can deduct bad submissions from said bounties.)
    - freejazz 2y ago
      Do you park in NYC? I don't think a single photograph is going to convey sufficient information to make it clear that someone is violating parking rules, many of which are temporal. I think it would also be weird to penalize people for reports that were ultimately un-actionable. Can you point to any government function that has a similar mechanism?
      - loeg 2y ago
        > I don't think a single photograph is going to convey sufficient information Seems like the obvious solution is: multiple photos! > Can you point to any government function that has a similar mechanism? https://www.motortrend.com/news/nyc-idling-fine-citizen-reporting-bounty/ https://www.motortrend.com/news/nyc-idling-fine-citizen-repo...
myhf 2y ago
No amount of automation will have any significant effect on the size or efficiency of a bureaucracy. http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...
akira2501 2y ago
> you will get a bloated government which will do everything manually Like creating useless bus lanes? Then creating useless programs to write tickets to those "parked illegally" in bus lanes? Then creating useless digital waste finding a "better way" to write these pointless tickets over a pointless lane? > The key is still to launch fast The key is to get rid of things that don't work and can't provide worthwhile value to the _majority_ of tax payers.
- mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
  The bus lanes are not useless, they have measurably improved commutes, and parking in them is in fact illegal, so why the air quotes?
  - akira2501 2y ago
    > they have measurably improved commutes By how much? 1%, 5%... or? It's measured so what's the measurement? > and parking in them is in fact illegal And all you have to prove this is a snapshot. Which are not accurate and is the basis for the entire thread here. And people who didn't commit any crime have been charged. So there is clearly an open question as to how many of these pictures appear to be illegal versus how many actually are. > so why the air quotes? Those are actual quotes and you've projected your assumptions into my actions. Did it harm your ability to understand what I wrote? If not then why make an issue of it?
    - markemer 2y ago
      They meant scare quotes. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scare%20quotes https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scare%20quotes While they may be “quotes” of stuff from the original (which that technically was) the intent was clear.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    Measurable and positive does not mean worthwhile. (Though I suspect that many bus lanes are in fact worthwhile but that's beside the point.) Furthermore, there's always someone who benefits and will lie with statistics to keep the gravy going.

xnx 2y ago

Despite the "A.I." in the headline, the source of the errors seems to be bad categorical data input and nothing AI related. The same problem likely could've happened with human traffic enforcement if they were given the wrong instructions.

jejfjfjfjsj 2y ago
In some German cities, bus driver simply hit a camera button when actually being blocked. Sounds like a good filter for this use case?
- JohnFen 2y ago
  That seems like a far superior solution.
  - soco 2y ago
    Unless you're on the hype train "all things AI". It's always surprising how many real life problems do not necessarily need a solution based on the buzzwords du jour. All things blockchain, all things microservices, all things as-a-service, all those came and went, washing off the bubbles and leaving behind the (fewer) worthy pieces.
    - woodruffw 2y ago
      Buzzwords aside, I'm pretty sure the MTA's license recognition here is plain old ALPR, of the kind that's already been in use for municipal fare/toll enforcement for ~15 years.
- xvedejas 2y ago
  This is also how it works in San Francisco (SFMTA Muni buses)
croes 2y ago
Bad training data is pretty much AI related. People outside AI research expect good answers no matter what you give to AI. Or to put it that way, wrong instructions are still natural intelligence related

lofatdairy 2y ago

I mean I still think this is a good idea. Seems like a combination of poor communication and probably an incomplete understanding of edge cases but illegal parking is a huge problem in NYC and even though there's a snitching program I think the scale can't be addressed without some level of automation. Obviously there are concerns with these sorts of things like misuse of data and whatnot but I don't think we're living in 1984 just because red light cameras exist.

rgovostes 2y ago

When I lived in California years ago I had a custom 2-letter plate. I gave the car to a relative who switched its registration to another state. Years later, I got a toll demand from an express lane around LA that had a false positive scan of my plate number—someone else’s partially obscured maybe? I argued the car was registered elsewhere and wasn’t driven in CA, and they denied the appeal. I asked for evidence but they refused. I tried a FOIA request but it was denied because there’s an exemption for data that reveals individuals’ driving patterns—to get the photo I would have had to show up at an office in LA to show my ID and registration to prove it was my car, which it wasn’t! CA law allows the plate scanning and dictates the toll violation letter must show the make and model of the vehicle in question. They just look up the DMV records for the scanned plate. They’re not doing any kind of verification that the vehicle matches. They have 100% faith in the infallibility of these scanners with no appeals process.

pcl 2y ago
Have you sent this note along to your state assembly representative and state senator? https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/ https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/
- rgovostes 2y ago
  I don't have a representative because I don't live in CA. I did contact one of the elected officials that oversees the Orange County Transportation Authority and their office did eventually get it dismissed.
ewoodrich 2y ago
Interesting how different our experiences were in a similar situation. I had a false positive FasTrak ticket from the San Diego area for a timeframe I was living in Sacramento that was tossed (including gigantic late penalties) after a phone call explaining I was at work hundreds of miles away at the time. I was all ready to go with Google Maps Timeline location data but they just took me at my word when they saw where the car was registered.
- 2y ago

mistrial9 2y ago

in other recent news, the Alameda County Transit system has enabled "AI" cameras on busses, that will auto-generate violations for civilian vehicles in the bus stop, in the new fast transit dedicated lanes, and who knows where else. In previous times, Alameda County special officers would issue $500 tickets for letting a passenger out of a private vehicle within a bus stop area. In case you don't know, the bus stops are everywhere, and often are large in busy downtown areas. The joke was that these special officers wore gold braids on their uniform, not to mark seniority, but to mark the amount of money generated !! Witnesses saw four or more tickets given out like that in one hour in a busy downtown area, on a certain day more than ten years ago. To be blunt, tickets of that value, generated automatically for common violations, is a money printing machine. Alameda County Transit in California cannot be the only ones implementing this across the US and elsewhere.

bobthepanda 2y ago
the point of the cameras, to some degree, is to make the common violations stop happening. you don't really have a right to pull over anywhere you want in 'a busy downtown area'.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  That's not really a compelling argument in a reality in which we allow people to just stop at the end of merge ramps because "whoops, poor/no planning".
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    Does one illegal or bad thing make another illegal thing okay? Why bother having any sort of laws or enforcement?
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  That's true, though I would argue that, especially around regional transit hubs, at least some number of parking spaces should be converted to pickup/drop-off spaces (3/5/10 minute parking). It's inane how hard it is to find a legal place to drop people off at some BART stations, and surely it's worth sacrificing some small number of parking spots for?

woodruffw 2y ago

I think the title and lede overstate this a bit: it was 2 bus lines (out of >300 in the NYCT system), and of the ~3800 violations issued, under 25% were incorrect. That's still unacceptable, of course. But the proximate error here appears to not be with incorrect recognition, but with training/monitoring data accidentally being redirected to enforcement.

Wowfunhappy 2y ago
It's actually much less bad than that. From the video at the top of the article: • The cameras issued 3,000 tickets which "should have been warnings." • The cameras issued 800 tickets for "no infraction at all". So out of 3,800 improperly issued tickets (!), under 25% went to people who were legally parked. The other 75% went to people who broke the law but should have been let off with a warning. As a bus rider, I don't feel so bad for them tbqh. I don't think we know the total number of properly issued tickets from these cameras, but it's likely much higher! > According to the New York City Department of Transportation, the city’s automated cameras – including red light cameras, speed cameras, and bus lane cameras – issue more than 40,000 violations per day. That includes many more types of cameras, but it's also per day!
cute_boi 2y ago
even 1% would be unacceptable and should always be manually reviewed. It is too much hassle to report etc..

impish9208 2y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42254668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42254668

ziptron 2y ago

> pay a second company $58 million to outfit an additional 1,000 buses with mobile camera systems How could it be $58k per bus to install a camera?

Rebelgecko 2y ago
I imagine the actual cameras are a relatively small part of the overall price
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  also keep in mind this is automotive grade stuff in relatively harsh conditions (the front of a bus); it needs to be more rugged than your average camera
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Surely it's just a dash cam with a button and maybe some kind of comms module. There are many mass-market dashcams with a 'record' button that saves a time period before and after pressing the button, it's pretty standard usage. The only new thing is sending the video on, and making sure the time/location are correct (many cameras do this via GPS already - standard usage). I'm not seeing what is so expensive or unique. Very profitable by the sounds of it!!!
    - krapht 2y ago
      I have doubts this is actually that profitable. More likely the company is rolling their labor overhead into the per-camera pricing. It's a small order too, only 1000 cameras.
    - bobthepanda 2y ago
      A bus goes through many more miles and hours of operation than the vast majority of cars. Most cars are parked for the vast majority of the day, and sometimes in covered garages. And how long do those cameras last? The feds only fund bus replacements at twelve years or 500,000 miles.

jmspring 2y ago

Some years back Santa Cruz updated the meter maids / parking enforcement to GPS enabled smart devices and they would still drive around, get out, take pictures (when someone was in violation). My wife and I were sitting outside a restaurant where such a vehicle was being photo'd. This particular meter person was known to be .. not nice. While said person was behind vehicle (old vw bus) and out of site of the meter, we slipped a couple of quarters in and got back to our seat. Watching the reaction (they already had a couple of photos) was priceless. Said person questioned about 3 different groups (myself included) and all played dumb and had a good laugh when done. The vehicle owner saw the interaction from the farmer's market across the way and bought a round for a couple of tables. Santa Cruz has a history of meter scofflawism - https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/mr-twister-s-mission-of-mercy-meter-feeding-3019706.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/mr-twister-s-mission-of-...

potato3732842 2y ago
I know someone who deflated the tires on their Jeep to get around a violation ticket for bumper height (i.e. the kind of thing they only ever enforce as a pretext for fishing). He asked the cop to re-measure. Cop was confused and mad.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  It's amazing how mechanized scofflaws believe they are uniquely above the law, and that dodging law enforcement is a personal victory. I think it's a sad commentary on the deterioration of public behavior in America (and this is almost exclusively an American thing ... in Germany a lifted Jeep would be seized and destroyed on its first day on the road.)
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    >It's amazing how mechanized scofflaws believe they are uniquely above the law, and that dodging law enforcement is a personal victory. I think it's a sad commentary on the deterioration of public behavior in America (and this is almost exclusively an American thing ... in Germany a lifted Jeep would be seized and destroyed on its first day on the road.) Don't be obtuse. It's not about the mechanization. It's about the capricious enforcement. If you weren't so blinded by bias you'd see that. I hope you get dogpiled for jaywalking or some other "we only ever enforce it as a pretext" violation. It might knock your moral compass back into calibration.

jareklupinski 2y ago

xkcd's foolproof license plate: https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/

pjmlp 2y ago

Welcome to Minority Report reality, fun times ahead.

ninalanyon 2y ago

Sure the cameras don't issue the fines? But even if they do it's actually a human or a group of humans who are responsible regardless of the actual workflow. Describing it as if the AI is responsible is both clickbait and tends to absolve the humans involved. Allowing the MTA to frame it in this way is a failure of journalism.