This is a phenomenal application of how fine-based bounties can be used to rapidly improve compliance with the law. Incredible work. I would absolutely use this if I lived in NYC; I'll recommend it to my friends there.
mhuffman 2 hours ago [-]
>This is a phenomenal application of how fine-based bounties can be used to rapidly improve compliance with the law.
This type of thing can get out of hand quickly. Without me giving controversial examples, just imagine for yourself the types of things that different states can make a crime, add a fine, then offer to give other citizens part or all of that fine if they turn in others. After that, think of how unscrupulous businesses could use it against competition.
hiAndrewQuinn 2 hours ago [-]
Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law. If switching to a fine-based bounty system like this suddenly causes an uproar over a given law, then I submit the proper thing is to look over that law and perhaps tear it down. Any "law" that people put up with because it isn't enforced 9 times out of 10 is little more than a tax upon those too honest to get away with it.
As for businesses using it against one another in competition: Same deal, I think that's an excellent thing. If this idling law causes NYC businesses to shift en masse to faster loading and unloading practices because their competitors are watching them like hawks, I don't think that's a bad thing.
mhuffman 2 hours ago [-]
>Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law.
Agree. More of my thought is what happens when everyone is incentivized with money to spy on everyone else? How can you misuse this as a government? How can unscrupulous businesses misuse this?
>If switching to a fine-based bounty system like this suddenly causes an uproar over a given law, then I submit the proper thing is to look over that law and perhaps tear it down.
I would submit that there is the danger that people might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.
>Any "law" that people put up with because it isn't enforced 9 times out of 10 is little more than a tax upon those too honest to get away with it.
Think a little harder and see if you can imagine why a law that isn't strongly enforced still might exist.
hiAndrewQuinn 1 hours ago [-]
>[P]eople might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.
I've said elsewhere the optimal mechanism here is for that money to be paid to the snitcher, from the person who is being turned in. This would lead us to assume that for most crimes of a personal nature, we would have about as many people losing money due to the law as making money due to it, and so the effect cancels out.
In situations where many more people make money and only a select few are losing big, well... Somehow I feel like that's usually for the best anyway. See my other comments on eg the runaway success of the False Claims Act. Or just consider the class action lawsuit and whether you think it fills a valuable role in society.
>Think a little harder and see if you can imagine why a law that isn't strongly enforced still might exist.
Thanks for letting me pick the reason, that's very thoughtful of you. Obviously it's because said law being strongly enforced would cause such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety, and thus further erode the monopoly on violence the state holds over its citizenry. Cops then have fewer en passants they can pull when they don't follow procedure, etc etc. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.
mhuffman 53 minutes ago [-]
>I've said elsewhere the optimal mechanism here is for that money to be paid to the snitcher, from the person who is being turned in.
In some cases, which seem like a good idea like corporate malfeasance whistleblowers or government grift whistleblowers. This is because the people paid by our tax dollars would be at a disadvantage compared to an insider in the company. In others, you could see the direction it must go.
>Thanks for letting me pick the reason, that's very thoughtful of you.
Cheers!
>Obviously it's because said law being strongly enforced would cause such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety, and thus further erode the monopoly on violence the state holds over its citizenry. Cops then have fewer en passants they can pull when they don't follow procedure, etc etc. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.
There might very well be laws like that. However, let me offer a non-controversial and obvious one. Speed limits. Many places have 65mph listed as a speed limit. Everyone knows you are not allowed to go faster. However very few place will pull you over for going 66mph or even 70mph. If they started pulling over everyone going 70 in a 65 there would not be "such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety" because we all know and they all knew they were breaking the law. But it isn't enforced in an authoritarian way because we have different vehicles, sometimes you need to pass, and frankly 70 and 65 just aren't that big of a problem. But almost everyone would agree that we do need a speed limit, although they might not agree on the number and a number has to be picked.
Now, I don't want to assume your political leanings, but I am getting some strong libertarian vibes. And you seem like a nice and thoughtful person, so maybe bad ideas don't even occur to you because you are honest and just don't think that way. But imagine, or go ask grok, some other ways this could work out. And while you are at it, imagine a law that did not effect all citizens the same. Now imagine that a bad law could effect a relatively small group much more than others. In what way could they cause affect a backlash that would quickly get a law repealed in its entirety?
Using money to incentivize any public action on behalf of the government should be a sort of last-resort situation where it makes sense and the people already being paid to do it can't for some reason. This is a very libertarian idea, in fact. A more reasonable idea, although much less libertarian, would be to pass a law that makes it where cars can not idle for more than a specified amount of time in certain situations, but that would come with its own can of worms don't you think? And I personally wouldn't be for such a law. In fact I am against the snitch on idlers law. If someone wants to pay $7 a gallon for gas to set there and idle it away, why shouldn't they be able to? How is it different than them driving the same gas away?
sghiassy 1 hours ago [-]
Love the app; will use.
Scared of MAGA targeting brown people with this type of social enforcement
CamperBob2 1 hours ago [-]
Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law.
Not really. If perfect, ubiquitious enforcement were possible, our laws would probably look very different.
renewiltord 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, like the ADA for example. We should not have started down that slippery slope. Repeal the ADA!
ffsm8 3 hours ago [-]
I wish it was was more common around the world. Not just with parking though, but everything in the context of cars.
Like letting the police install a permanent speed trap on your property or even pay for the privilege of them doing so. I'd bet that'd curb a lot of speeding in short order
hiAndrewQuinn 2 hours ago [-]
There's no need for violence. In fact, the capital outlay would be inefficient.
If you want to curb speeding, the solution looks much the same: Pay reporters some portion of the fines collected from the speeder. You will very quickly see a cottage industry of Internet connected dashcams and on-board AI solutions spring up, because it's practically free money if you drive safely yourself for long enough. Pretty soon nobody will be speeding, simply because you never know who or what is watching.
This is a set of economic-legal policies I've been writing about here and there for a long time. It's great stuff.
gametorch 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like the antithesis of freedom.
What a miserable society that would be to live in.
hiAndrewQuinn 2 hours ago [-]
You have it backwards. A perfect detection rate for crime makes it much more important that we define conservatively what we even consider to be a crime in the first place, and then what kind of punishment we levy upon it.
You also have it backwards because it already reliably makes society better for you. Take the case of Biogen employee Michael Bawduniak, who spent seven years documenting covert payments that steered doctors toward Biogen’s multiple‑sclerosis drugs illegally. When the United States Department of Justice settled the case for $900 million in 2022, Bawduniak received roughly $266 million, or about 30% of the federal proceeds, under the False Claims Act. It's a very similar mechanism, and anyone you may know who suffers from multiple sclerosis has likely had their treatment options materially improved thanks to Bawduniak's actions. But those kinds of actions only happen when you have the right mechanisms in place, to reward people who do the right thing.
gametorch 2 hours ago [-]
I think your example is really interesting and I think you do have a point.
But culturally speaking, America is only fine with applying this idea to the upper-upper class, like billionaires and hedge fund managers.
It is absolutely unacceptable to apply surveillance tech to arbitrary middle class citizens. Full stop.
I will absolutely speak up to ensure this value is upheld in American society.
Edit: Thought about this more and I think Americans have almost no mercy for businesses but extreme mercy for the average citizen. It's not cool to snitch on the average citizen for a crime that involves citations and fines. It is totally cool to do that to a business.
bcyn 2 hours ago [-]
Why? How do you draw the line between people who deserve to be "surveilled" (if you can even call it that in this case...) vs. people who don't?
You are entitled to your opinion of course but it just seems extremely arbitrary.
gametorch 2 hours ago [-]
I don't have a good, rational answer.
I think the idea is vaguely that the upper-upper class statistically must've done something wrong or have the power to cause extreme harm, therefore it's okay to snitch on them but not your regular Joe.
I'm just espousing the standard American middle class views about freedom here. Not trying to argue they are sound or rational.
hiAndrewQuinn 2 hours ago [-]
Well, I disagree, but I pick my battles carefully and would never risk turning someone against the False Claims Act to win such a small victory. Point conceded.
renewiltord 2 hours ago [-]
Modern people are so risk averse. Back in the day we would rob trains. These days society is the equivalent of a HOA - freedom is fast forgotten and trains go mostly unmolested except through that one bastion of liberty: Los Angeles. Society is full of tattletales and stool pigeons. A criminal society is a free society. Order is antithetical to expression.
ffsm8 2 hours ago [-]
Uh, did someone advocate for violence?
hiAndrewQuinn 2 hours ago [-]
A speed trap is a kind of violence, yes. Have you ever hit one of those things at high speed before? Ouch.
EDIT: I've been away from the States for too long. I was indeed thinking about speed bumps, not traps. Traps are cameras, and they therefore get a thumbs up from me in the beautiful bounties-on-everything-we-care-about future.
ffsm8 2 hours ago [-]
a speed trap is a device that measures the speed of cars that drive by it. It's usually on the sidewalk or (as I proposed here) in a property adjacent to the street. You're not supposed to hit them.
Are you talking about speed bumps?
hiAndrewQuinn 2 hours ago [-]
I am! Mea maxima culpa. Yes, I agree with you.
pimlottc 2 hours ago [-]
“More Dunkin”? Is that an auto correct type for “more common”?
ffsm8 2 hours ago [-]
Oof, yes. I edited it
gametorch 3 hours ago [-]
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Zenbit_UX 2 hours ago [-]
You created a subscription service for power-~~users~~ snitches?
This is wild demonstration of misaligned incentive structures at every level.
9cb14c1ec0 3 hours ago [-]
Spying on your friends, neighbors, and family? Nothing to see here, just old Soviet style repression tactics.
kennywinker 2 hours ago [-]
I understand the sentiment, but if you accept the premise that idling vehicles harm everyone, which they probably do - via air quality, foreign wars to keep oil flowing, and climate change - then why should we not fine the heck out of anybody who harms
us all?
Don’t like getting reported by randos with apps? Don’t idle.
My only beef with the law itself, is that the fines need to be income-linked - otherwise it’s only illegal if you’re poor.
tptacek 2 hours ago [-]
These are people spying on commercial vehicles abusing rights of way to avoid paying their fair share of the cost to carry them in the area (parking, in particular). Why are you taking the side of the trucks?
userbinator 2 hours ago [-]
Orwell was right.
kennywinker 2 hours ago [-]
You mean when he said “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” or something else?
CamperBob2 1 hours ago [-]
Not really. He thought the regime would have to use force. He didn't predict that people would line up outside Wal-Mart at zero dark thirty on Black Friday morning to grab the latest, greatest telescreen models, and then fight each other like dogs for the last ones in stock.
tootie 50 minutes ago [-]
Idling trucks are a public health hazard. Reporting actual crimes isn't spying. Certainly not when it's on public streets.
p3rls 38 minutes ago [-]
I've had so many people over the years (nearly all of them the kinds of people who looked like they never had to work a job in their lives) try to surreptitiously record my truck's plates when I was doing fire protection inspections in the city.
Don't worry though, every ticket the company got was billed right back to buildings we were working at in another form. The balance sheet always wins.
scoofy 2 hours ago [-]
or “Stop breaking the law asshole”
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screye 4 hours ago [-]
Amazing !
Decentralizing traffic enforcement is a win-win. Bravo to NYC for opening this sort of program and OP for turning it into an "efficient free market".
Will try it out soon. Bookmarked.
kennywinker 2 hours ago [-]
Fines not linked to income means it’s legal if you’re rich. I’m all for fining polluters to disincentivize pollution, but until we have income-pinned fines i’m not reporting any car under $50k
gametorch 3 hours ago [-]
It's not a win-win.
Look at China as a perfect example of what happens when you apply this idea at scale.
mstaoru 2 hours ago [-]
I lived in China for many many years and this is not a good example. Parking, and driving in general, is chaotic and unregulated. Yes, you have cameras everywhere that detect running on red or taking a wrong lane, but that's about makes it. Speeding, haphazard parking, everything is allowed. Scooters go anywhere. Bikes go anywhere. People go anywhere. Red, green, anything in between, it's a free for all. Like a policeman smoking under "no smoking" signs is totally normal. I'd say, you can get away with mostly anything in China, nobody would care (unless you're non-Chinese, then dutiful neighbors will report your every sneeze).
PS: Yet I do find OP's idea reminding me of China. Having a society that polices itself (just in China it's more about thought, not behavior) is definitely not a thing I would enjoy.
Zenbit_UX 2 hours ago [-]
I’ll never understand how people believe bike and pedestrian “infractions” to be the same as that of motor vehicles.
Members of this “get off my sidewalk!” group often fail to realize this: Did you study to become a pedestrian? Did you go to a bicycle driving school to acquire a permit to operate one? Was an exam at all given in order to use public foot or bike paths?
If the answer is no, then you aren’t held to the same standards as cars, which are heavily regulated and require licenses to operate.
Obeying road signs for bicycle and pedestrians are suggestions, rarely enforced, and the worst case scenario is usually you hurt yourself. Your ability to hurt others has an upper bound that society deems acceptable.
dale_huevo 4 hours ago [-]
> Decentralizing traffic enforcement is a win-win
Win-win for who exactly? Maybe we need to decentralize and AI-accelerate construction permit reporting too. Your backyard fence looks DIY and not up to code and your porch light looks like a fire hazard.
perihelions 4 hours ago [-]
They're trialing something like that in France. There's a project that uses machine learning on aerial photography databases to search for objects in peoples' backyards, for enforcement,
Most cities have ways for neighbors to report things like this.
dale_huevo 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, and they're almost exclusively used by the worst type of vindictive chickenshit humans imaginable. I've known people affected by this, whose evil neighbors used 311 as a weapon because they simply didn't like them, and caused them tens of thousands of dollars in forced unnecessary renovations not to mention stress, for trivial violations that are widely ignored.
jen20 4 hours ago [-]
> Win-win for who exactly?
Society at large? All the people who don't have the breathe the fumes of some garbage commercial vehicle.
> Your backyard fence looks DIY
Provided it's up for code, whether it was "done yourself" or not doesn't matter.
> your porch light looks like a fire hazard.
Absolutely this should be reported.
gametorch 3 hours ago [-]
It's not a win-win for society.
What do you think of China, where the application of this idea is widespread?
It used to be that as long as the vehicle was on the same block as a school or park, you only had to take a one-minute video (versus three-minute). Now there are some annoying documentation requirements if you want to submit a shorter video.
Doesn’t impact the overall usefulness of the program very much IMO — I just didn’t add special handling for school/park reports like I would’ve before they made that change.
michaelmrose 2 hours ago [-]
Presumably they don't want you taking videos of people who aren't in fact breaking the law and profiting from tickets. NYC regulation requires you to not idle more than 5 minutes.
Although they don't require you to actually take a 5 minute video it is overwhelmingly likely that most people don't pull out there phone every time a vehicle stops in NYC so that most 3 minute videos are liable to be of 5 minute idles.
There are obviously 2 types of problem children cheaters and dummies. It's easier for cheaters to take a 1 minute video since even those who don't intend to idle for any substantial time may pause a moment. For dummies making them actually sit there and film 3 minutes decreases the chance that they will accidentally misunderstand how much time has passed. People are heavily biased towards their own benefits and are liable to miss-perceive 4.5 minutes as 5. Less possible when he pulled out his phone at the 2+ minute mark and now has to wait 3 minutes to have enough.
gametorch 3 hours ago [-]
Good. Those lawyers are doing God's work.
wingspar 2 hours ago [-]
In this age of generative AI, how would a someone defend against a maliciously AI generated/altered video report?
bob_theslob646 2 hours ago [-]
Most of NYC has cameras. The timestamp and location data from those can be linked.
You could also have multiple references to validate via crowdscoring.
You can also find people who are bad actors to decentivize them from mass reporting.
vineyardmike 5 hours ago [-]
Within the last year or so, I discovered my city’s 311 app, which I’ve become addicted to. I don’t drive, so I’m always walking around the neighborhood, and got in the habit of always reporting graffiti, dumping, illegally parked cars, etc.
This had inspired me to try and make a few apps for civic use, but I discovered that many of the accessible web tools for my city have rules against bots. For example, the city maintains a list of locations and dates where parking is temporarily restricted for short term things like construction, but I can’t scrape it.
I really wish that the government (at any level) made more serviced and data available as APIs or digital formats. The government is usually bad at building/buying websites and services, and I’d have done it for free (or for $0.99 on the App Store).
yodsanklai 3 hours ago [-]
> always reporting graffiti
How does your city deal with graffitis? mine is plagued with graffitis and I can't see how they can be fought. It takes too much resources to remove them in a timely manner and impossible to catch the perpetrators.
vineyardmike 2 hours ago [-]
It’s just a game of cat and mouse. I dont think there is a way to “win”, because it’s so easy to make new graffiti, and not practical to try and police and catch people in the act. I think they require private property owners to clean their own graffiti, which really sucks, but makes it more manageable for the city to focus on public areas.
The city really just has a queue of cleanup sites and priorities locations that are high visibility or important, like school yards or transit infrastructure. An elementary school nearby had its mural destroyed by graffiti, and it was cleaned up within a day.
dcsan 3 hours ago [-]
And the cost is often on the small business owner
renewiltord 2 hours ago [-]
San Francisco does the sensible thing and fines the property owner. This is the just and right thing. In fact, I strongly support putting victims of drunk driving in jail: this strongly disincentivizes driving near drunk drivers.
dawnerd 49 minutes ago [-]
They do that in my city too and it’s kinda insane. There was a shop that had a mural and the city considered it graffiti. So dumb.
gametorch 3 hours ago [-]
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tiagod 2 hours ago [-]
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gametorch 3 hours ago [-]
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kennywinker 2 hours ago [-]
If a crime’s punishment is a fine, that means it’s legal if you’re rich.
Man, I wish my city would make it possible to report drivers breaking the law. My big issue is cars parking in the cycle lanes. 1830 cars got fined for that in my city in total in 2024. Aka 5 a day. As a single cyclist I see more cars parked in cycle lanes every day on my commute than all those hundred officers give tickets to in total..
cosmic_cheese 3 hours ago [-]
What I’d like to see is hard separation of roads and bike lanes. As a cyclist, nothing but a line painted on the road makes me feel unsafe, as a driver it’s difficult to not get nervous when passing a cyclist in the lane, and culturally drivers are generally favored over cyclists which results in things like parking in bike lanes not being adequately enforced. All these things would be solved by bike lanes being fully independent from the road.
josephcsible 3 hours ago [-]
> What I’d like to see is hard separation of roads and bike lanes.
That's a great idea, as long as the hard separation goes both ways with bikes no longer being allowed in car lanes.
cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago [-]
Doable, but would probably require bike paths to be wider than they currently are and split into two lanes: one for road bikers and one for everybody else.
matsemann 2 hours ago [-]
Why? I don't get this "gotcha". Is there any actual rational reason for making such rules, or is it stemming from some annoyance from seeing cyclists in the road?
There already exists roads where cyclists can't be: Highways/motorways. If the problem is cyclists in the road, that solves itself by building better infrastructure. Where there's adequate cycling infrastructure, cyclists prefer to use it. Where there's lacking or none, one should of course be able to use the road. Otherwise it would be a de facto ban on cycling, which I'm sure was your point?
josephcsible 1 hours ago [-]
> Is there any actual rational reason for making such rules, or is it stemming from some annoyance from seeing cyclists in the road?
It's from a combination of getting stuck behind cyclists going really slowly and with no opportunity to pass them, and from so much blatantly illegal behavior by them like running red lights without even slowing down.
58 minutes ago [-]
crusty 2 hours ago [-]
I'll have to hunt down a link to the piece but I swear I saw a video about a few people in NYC who muddy go around finding idling vehicles and piece together the fine bounties into full time equivalent work. This could really disrupt their industry.
theptip 5 hours ago [-]
Nice. Pricing seems a bit steep for occasional use; does iOS make it easy to do micro-transactions with Apple Pay? (I get the dev may be trying to put bread on the table with this, which is also fine…)
rafram 5 hours ago [-]
That's a fair point. I have to see how the AI costs stack up, since heavy use can run up the bill pretty quickly with video inputs, and all subscriptions come with unlimited usage.
dummydummy1234 4 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't it make more sense to charge per report?
theptip 4 hours ago [-]
As a user I’d be happy to pay $5 for a bundle of credits and just top up whenever it runs out.
And as you say you don’t want to be in the position where a whale costs you $50 by submitting a crazy number of requests.
Maybe these are big-scale problems though :)
gametorch 3 hours ago [-]
I would guess at least half of American society vehemently rejects this idea.
userbinator 2 hours ago [-]
Hopefully more than half.
a5c11 5 hours ago [-]
Since you've mentioned it, that'd be great to give some details regarding the AI mechanism you used. I really find that trend of hiding everything behind "The Divine AI" off-putting. What exactly AI does in the context of the application?
3 hours ago [-]
georgeburdell 3 hours ago [-]
Wish my California city had this attitude that you can report people via an app. So many offenses “run with the driver”, i.e. they will not prosecute unless a cop sees it happening and positively identifies the driver. They won’t even prosecute red light running from a video with the license plate clearly visible.
rurcliped 3 hours ago [-]
feature request: AI-based risk analysis, with a model of which types of commercial vehicles at that location are likely to be controlled by organized crime
theptip 5 hours ago [-]
I like the general idea, and I’ve been surprised this hasn’t taken off elsewhere, eg citizen videos for traffic violations like blocking intersections, it seems these should be ROI positive for the city to implement (lower enforcement costs, more ticket revenue).
bluefirebrand 4 hours ago [-]
I really don't understand why anyone would want this
Do you really want to live in a society where we're monitored for even the slightest infractions at all times and automatically punished regardless of any circumstances that might explain the behavior?
gorbachev 4 hours ago [-]
New York City doesn't do this for "even the slightest infractions at all times".
The idling regulations are based on real harm, and the reporting requirements include things like recording video to prove that the car you're reporting didn't start idling in the last 5 seconds, but has, in fact, been doing that for 3 minutes or longer, or 1 minute or longer adjacent to a school.
You have to actually submit a 3:01 (or 1:01) minute video as part of the report for that to be actionable.
And, yes, I would really, really want to live in a society where unnecessary idling is not allowed. And if I was living next to a street corner where that happens regularly, I would be on that street corner recording videos any time I'd have free time, and more, if I had babies, who are especially vulnerable to air pollution, living with me.
hiAndrewQuinn 3 hours ago [-]
In Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker showed crime can be discouraged if the expected punishment outweighs the reward. Expected punishment has not one, but two important factors: How big the punishment is, and how likely the punishment is to actually be levied.
Punishment likelihood depends on how likely the crime is to be detected in the first place. Older societies such as medieval Europe or Qing dynasty era China used the death penalty for so many seemingly minor things, and this formula was a big part of why. State authorities at that period of human history had a very low chance of actually detecting something like forgery. So in order to deter criminals they had to ratchet up just how big the potential punishment actually was if you did get caught.
Conversely, as our societies have improved their ability to detect crimes, our stomach for policies like “Forgery is punishable by death” has rightfully taken a nosedive. So, yes, the trend I've seen across the centuries suggests to me I might well prefer to live in a society where the detection rate is higher than it currently is. There's no reason to suspect we've hit upon the optimal point for human flourishing where we are now.
woodruffw 29 minutes ago [-]
This isn’t for chewing gum on the Subway. It’s for a specific kind of scofflaw activity that no society would tolerate were it not for the presumptive shield of goodness that surrounds drivers in this country.
Having grown up in the city and gone to a public school where over half of my peers had asthma from the heavy truck route next to our playground, I welcome any kind of financial realignment between drivers (especially commercial drivers) and their behavior.
collingreen 4 hours ago [-]
I get your take and agree with the sentiment BUT I don't think this somehow requires "automatic punishment". Also, if the laws are there then I tend to think they should be enforced. Maybe this kind of thing will empower places to drop some of the laws most folks agree are "slightest infractions".
ponector 3 hours ago [-]
I would like to live in a society where everyone is strictly following traffic regulations. Almost every rule there is written with someone's blood.
Also basics driving rules like zip merge will make traffic better.
crote 4 hours ago [-]
Some countries are already doing this, for example Vietnam and China.
I recall reading about it years ago because some enterprising individuals decided that the revenue from catching random violations in-the-wild wasn't enough, so they started to deliberately create dangerous situations, where breaking a traffic law (which would then be recorded and submitted for a reward) was the only safe option for the victim. Unfortunately I haven't been able to quickly find a source to back this up.
hiAndrewQuinn 3 hours ago [-]
This is why optimal policy design has the fines get paid directly from the violator to the reporter. That brings its own quirks, but they're all surprisingly tractable with other market mechanisms.
There's a whole literature on this topic in economics under mechanism design. They've been a longstanding research interest of mine, I consider it almost like the land value tax of legal enforcement by this point.
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bluescrn 5 hours ago [-]
Milking motorists is very profitable. Stopping more problematic crime, not so much.
So we end up with anarcho-tyranny, where 'real' crime is policed poorly, if at all - but loads of resources and tech are deployed aggressively policing+punishing mostly-law-abiding people for the most minor of infractions.
calvinmorrison 4 hours ago [-]
Anarcho-Tyranny: A of government in which the good citizen lives in fear of government , while the criminals run amok without fear of repercussions.
eth0up 4 hours ago [-]
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dang 4 hours ago [-]
The comments you're talking about are getting flagged, mostly because they're off topic.
Edit: I've unflagged some of the others, but here are some examples of the kind I mean:
Bullshit. Many comments here, not mine, are disappearing at a rate that in 10 years I've never seen.
eth0up 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 4 hours ago [-]
I don't want to ban you! I'd appreciate it if you'd stop posting these off-topic comments though.
Everyone goes on tilt sometimes; it happens. But please stop.
mjmsmith 4 hours ago [-]
This has nothing to do with "milking motorists", whatever that means. (The phrase generally seems to be used by people who are angry that they can't speed and run red lights with impunity).
gametorch 4 hours ago [-]
> This has nothing to do with "milking motorists"
Forcing motorists to pay for minor infractions is the entire point of the app.
bluescrn 3 hours ago [-]
So when actual criminals leave their stolen getaway car idling as they go and loot a store, the owner of the stolen car now gets an extra fully-automated fine with likely no way to appeal it, and the real criminals get away free.
mjmsmith 3 hours ago [-]
Upvoting this because I needed the laugh.
mjmsmith 3 hours ago [-]
The law applies to commercial vehicles. The aggregate effect of commercial vehicles ignoring the law isn't minor. You can find out more by following the links at the top of the page.
4 hours ago [-]
Nifty3929 3 hours ago [-]
I feel it's Orwellian, or Stalin-esq to have us being paid off to snitch on each other.
Certainly, if you have evidence of murder or something, please do report it.
But for an idling vehicle?
Note that these laws are only targeting idling while parked, rather than during normal use, such as at a traffic light. This is called "true-idling" or "long-duration" idling.
Has anybody considered how much CO2 or other greenhouse gases are actually released by "true-idling" or "long-duration" idling vehicles, either individually or in aggregate? I spent a few minutes researching it with an LLM and couldn't come up with much. Most of the information and numbers I got were for ALL idling, including during normal driving like at a traffic light. My guess based on that is that it (true idling) is a trivially small amount of CO2 compared to the overall.
But it's plenty to earn yourself a nice payoff at the expense of your hard working delivery driver!
paulgb 3 hours ago [-]
I think the intent is less about the CO2 emissions as about the air quality that people have to breathe (hence a stricter standard in some locations).
I don’t know about measurable effects but I hate when I pass a long-idling truck and can taste it in the air.
gametorch 3 hours ago [-]
> I hate when I pass a long-idling truck and can taste it in the air.
And I hate living in a surveillance state.
toast0 3 hours ago [-]
> I feel it's Orwellian, or Stalin-esq to have us being paid off to snitch on each other.
Sure, but it's a different kind of dystopia to have commercial vehicles idling and fouling the air outside of normal driving. As described where you have to capture 3 minutes of idling (1 minute near schools) and assuming most people take a while to notice, rather than starting the timer immediately when the vehicle stops, it seems like a reasonable way to enhance compliance.
Idling while parked may not be a large contribution to total emissions, but it's harder to justify than idling in normal operation, and easier to enforce against, so there you go. Sometimes refrigerated transport more or less needs to idle to keep the contents at temperature, not sure if there's exceptions for that or if they just need to retrofit with more insulation or batteries to run the compressor or etc in order to comply.
Idling at lights probably gets reduced by auto start/stop in new vehicles as well as congestion charges reducing traffic and probably dwell time at lights. Auto start/stop isn't a universally loved thing; it makes some cars really frustrating to use, but when done well, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff to reduce unneccesary emissions.
3 hours ago [-]
stemlord 3 hours ago [-]
Feature request: the ability to report illegally parked police vehicles
3 hours ago [-]
Ekaros 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
perihelions 3 hours ago [-]
> "You walk against red light and your face gets plastered around billboards as named criminal."
I'm unsure if you were obliquely referring to this, or if you were intending to suggest a fictional idea. But what you described is already a thing that's happening in mainland China,
> "In the southern city of Shenzhen, Chinese authorities have launched a new surveillance system loaded with facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and a big database to crack down on jaywalking as well as other crimes."
> "As a result, photographs of pedestrians caught in the act, along with their names and social identification numbers, are now instantly displayed on LED screens installed at Shenzhen road junctions."
This is incredible sarcasm. It seems like people who like this sort of control always find a narrative to sell it to the people. The US still has the Patriot act on the books, and that's been the norm for some people's entire lives.
bluescrn 4 hours ago [-]
Facial recognition isn't enough. We need nano-drones that can grab DNA samples. Can't avoid that by wearing a mask/balaclava...
bapak 4 hours ago [-]
For those who don't know, this is China today.
4 hours ago [-]
J7jKW2AAsgXhWm 5 hours ago [-]
Would be great to have this for illegally parked parks as well.
meindnoch 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mh- 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, people just up and leave those things all over the place. I'm glad someone is finally speaking up.
RamblingCTO 5 hours ago [-]
Kinda offtopic, but I think this is so dystopian as it's only the beginning. Technocracy at its best. Have a bad starter and don't wanna stop the car? The numbers and rules don't care, no room for benevolence.
olivermuty 5 hours ago [-]
My kids asthma wants your commercial car in a service bay, not idling outside a restaurant. I am all for not making a technocratic dystopia but this reasoning seems wrong lol
whycome 5 hours ago [-]
That’s the problem. Major polluters have convinced people it’s the small scale production to attack rather than the giant industrial polluters.
We also allow incredibly inefficient engines that produce lots of pollution.
How about a pollution credit trading program then? If my efficient car produces way less pollution than your gas-guzzling truck, I should get the room to idle until I reach our agreed max.
A technological snitch program is a weird and messed up outcome when we ignore the base problems.
But, cool technical achievement. I’m scared that a similar parking snitch program is all too easy as well. Car parked 3.5 hours in a 3hr max neighbourhood? Get them fined and get a sweet bounty! Thanks I hate it.
whstl 3 hours ago [-]
> Major polluters have convinced people it’s the small scale production to attack rather than the giant industrial polluters
It's both. A car idling outside your window is still gonna be an issue even if the planet somehow solve the big stuff.
dale_huevo 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe the commercial driver has asthma too and needs to run the AC.
ksynwa 5 hours ago [-]
Your kid's asthms would appreciate more if there were fewer cars on roads and logistics leaned more on robust public transportation rather than putting the onus on individual household to own and operate multi-tonne vehicles.
toomuchtodo 5 hours ago [-]
New York City has already implemented a congestion surcharge in Manhattan to destroy demand for using personal vehicles, and has a robust public transit system. The only step left would be mandating EVs, and outlawing combustion.
Right now we are in the “laws are seldom actually enforced” regime.
It seems pretty clear that laws will be enforced more in future, the obvious response is to go prune the laws to get rid of the ones that we actually aren’t OK with being enforced.
bluescrn 4 hours ago [-]
Laws will be enforced if it's safe and profitable to do so, especially if the process can be fully automated.
Meanwhile, industrial-scale shoplifting, hard drugs, sex crimes, riots. No automated enforcement possible there, let alone profitable automated enforcement.
theptip 4 hours ago [-]
I feel things like shoplifting should actually be automatable, it’s a question of ROI currently.
One idea I play with is “police 2.0” where you can dispatch a small fast drone to a crime scene, and follow the perp from a safe distance. A lot of crimes could be solved this way (eg car chases, illegal dirt bike gangs, petty robbery etc).
I really don’t want pervasive surveillance, but perhaps there is a middle ground where response times are fast enough that you can be purely reactive to a 911 call/app.
Feels quite slippery-slope though. I think we should expect increased debate on the social contract as these new systems become more capable and the “enforcement gap” becomes larger.
5 hours ago [-]
gametorch 4 hours ago [-]
Genuinely curious, why aren't people allowed to say this is dystopian without getting flagged? What rule, specifically, does that violate?
I think this is dystopian. Paying people to rat out their fellow citizens. Nightmarish.
What if this idea was applied to the laws ICE is trying to enforce? Would you think that's dystopian?
rafram 3 hours ago [-]
This program specifically fines businesses with fleets of commercial vehicles (delivery trucks, buses, et cetera) for illegal idling, and escalates the fines for repeat offenders. You can't report random individuals, nor would I really want to build an app for that. The point is to get businesses to stop polluting.
gametorch 3 hours ago [-]
Okay, that makes it a little less dystopian.
But you make money off people snitching.
And you're setting the stage for something far worse, imo.
paulgb 3 hours ago [-]
I see where you’re coming from, but the alternatives are either that the law isn’t enforced, or the state ramps up its own surveillance, which is more dystopian to me.
I see this as in the same vein as SEC whistleblower awards, which I’ve never heard described as dystopian. Businesses just don’t have the same expectation of privacy that individuals do.
gametorch 3 hours ago [-]
I mean, the law not being enforced is wayyyyyyyyy less dystopian than this app and the numerous other ones like it that are bound to spring up.
I'd rather live in truck fumes than a hyper-automated snitch surveillance state.
octernion 2 hours ago [-]
you have like 50 comments in this thread whining about the law and desperately wanting businesses (not private individuals!) to idle their trucks next to schools.
maybe take a break man. not healthy.
gametorch 1 hours ago [-]
I'm specifically commenting a lot because posts that have more comments than upvotes get downranked on the front page.
octernion 1 hours ago [-]
it’s not working - it’s one of the highest ranking posts - and you really don’t want to go around admitting that. seriously, take a break.
gametorch 1 hours ago [-]
Yep and I got an upvoted comment dissenting against all the authoritarian bootlickers in every single thread on this post. People agree with me. Even on the comments of mine that got flagged lol
It even pissed people off enough that one of the mods started commenting about my own personal projects that have nothing to do with this lmao
Oh and I guess it did work because now it's down to 28, almost off the front page. Much lower than where it was before
octernion 22 minutes ago [-]
it’s a 5 hour old post man. just because you are mad at not being able to poison the air of children isn’t a good reason to be insane about it.
bayruiner 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
darkwater 3 hours ago [-]
Being about businesses only and no individuals makes all the difference in the world.
Otherwise it should be seen as dystopian also the fact that you can call the police on your neighborhood because "you heard noises".
I bet that the friction in the submission process was deliberately added to avoid abuses, but maybe it's just incompetence. Depending on the reason, this app can be either good or against the spirit of the rule.
nerevarthelame 3 hours ago [-]
Is it still "snitching" if the reporter, as the person breathing the unnecessarily polluted air, is a victim of the crime?
gametorch 3 hours ago [-]
Yes.
dang 3 hours ago [-]
People are certainly allowed to say that. Your comment, for example, hasn't been flagged.
However, a lot of the comments tending in that direction have been (1) generic and (2) flamebait and/or fulminatey, which are bad for HN threads and against the site guidelines.
You regularly spam a generic generative ai ‘art’ thing on this site so of all people it feels like you’d have a broader, less kneejerky and more charitable view of what use of the technology is ‘dystopian’
gametorch 2 hours ago [-]
That's a fair point. It's hard to assess whether I'm being honest with myself about that.
But I know this app is truly evil in my system of morality.
AI art can be very soulless. Very dehumanizing. In certain sense.
But those two qualities are undeniably attached to surveillance states. In all senses. There is no argument against that.
pvg 2 hours ago [-]
It’s someone’s show hn for something that’s NYC law, designed to address a specific local problem. Calling this ‘evil’ is, at a minimum, unserious bombast which the site rules ask you to avoid, especially when discussing someone else’s work. You can critique the work without the Savonarola act. It also happens to be more effective that way so it’s in your own interest.
gametorch 2 hours ago [-]
I really am supportive of 99.9% of Show HNs, merely for the sake of the posters actually trying to build something
This is one of the few things I feel very strongly about and I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it. His idea is actively harming what makes America a good place to live in. And his idea is what makes China a bad place to live in. I'm not just going to sit here and say nothing.
I don't care if this negative EV for my own personal interests. I felt the need to speak up and people agree with me. Hopefully his post gets taken down.
pvg 2 hours ago [-]
Nobody is telling you how and how strongly to feel - just not to be a yelly asshole about it.
This is a valid show hn - if you can’t comment on it reasonably just don’t comment or find a thread where the general surveillance topic is actually the topic.
gametorch 2 hours ago [-]
You're the one bringing up my personal projects that are irrelevant to this post.
I don't care about you or your opinion. Ban me.
sadhnmods 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe a bunch of people just don't agree with your position. (If they're idling and I report them, I'm a snitch. If I don't, I get to breathe the pollution. Why is snitching worse than poisoning people in your city? Why should the snitch be the bad guy in that situation, rather than the polluter?)
gametorch 3 hours ago [-]
False dichotomy. Both the snitch and the polluter are bad guys.
If you want an example of widespread application of this idea in a society, look at China. I rest my case.
3 hours ago [-]
theyknowitsxmas 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 3 hours ago [-]
This isn't trolls - it's people getting triggered by a provocative topic. For plenty of obvious reasons, different people have different reactions to this kind of thing.
Btw, "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
I'm shocked that a site, most of whose readership is engaged in surveillance capitalism as a career, is excited about this.
I've been looking for an app to donate my time as a volunteer meter maid.
dang 4 hours ago [-]
That's not a remotely accurate description of HN's readership!
4 hours ago [-]
yapyap 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
4 hours ago [-]
theyknowitsxmas 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe so, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
eth0up 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
4 hours ago [-]
dale_huevo 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
5 hours ago [-]
Doctor_Fegg 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bluescrn 4 hours ago [-]
We've got a brand new war in the Middle East, and a big ongoing one in Ukraine.
If we can't prevent wars between nations, there's no hope of the planet coming together to the extent required to manipulate the climate in a meaningful way.
eth0up 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
5 hours ago [-]
dale_huevo 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 4 hours ago [-]
Would you please stop posting like this? Once was fine, but half a dozen is too much. You've made your point, and that's ok, but this is not curious conversation.
Also when the posts start getting dyspeptic-meta like this, something has gone wrong.
This type of thing can get out of hand quickly. Without me giving controversial examples, just imagine for yourself the types of things that different states can make a crime, add a fine, then offer to give other citizens part or all of that fine if they turn in others. After that, think of how unscrupulous businesses could use it against competition.
As for businesses using it against one another in competition: Same deal, I think that's an excellent thing. If this idling law causes NYC businesses to shift en masse to faster loading and unloading practices because their competitors are watching them like hawks, I don't think that's a bad thing.
Agree. More of my thought is what happens when everyone is incentivized with money to spy on everyone else? How can you misuse this as a government? How can unscrupulous businesses misuse this?
>If switching to a fine-based bounty system like this suddenly causes an uproar over a given law, then I submit the proper thing is to look over that law and perhaps tear it down.
I would submit that there is the danger that people might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.
>Any "law" that people put up with because it isn't enforced 9 times out of 10 is little more than a tax upon those too honest to get away with it.
Think a little harder and see if you can imagine why a law that isn't strongly enforced still might exist.
I've said elsewhere the optimal mechanism here is for that money to be paid to the snitcher, from the person who is being turned in. This would lead us to assume that for most crimes of a personal nature, we would have about as many people losing money due to the law as making money due to it, and so the effect cancels out.
In situations where many more people make money and only a select few are losing big, well... Somehow I feel like that's usually for the best anyway. See my other comments on eg the runaway success of the False Claims Act. Or just consider the class action lawsuit and whether you think it fills a valuable role in society.
>Think a little harder and see if you can imagine why a law that isn't strongly enforced still might exist.
Thanks for letting me pick the reason, that's very thoughtful of you. Obviously it's because said law being strongly enforced would cause such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety, and thus further erode the monopoly on violence the state holds over its citizenry. Cops then have fewer en passants they can pull when they don't follow procedure, etc etc. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.
In some cases, which seem like a good idea like corporate malfeasance whistleblowers or government grift whistleblowers. This is because the people paid by our tax dollars would be at a disadvantage compared to an insider in the company. In others, you could see the direction it must go.
>Thanks for letting me pick the reason, that's very thoughtful of you.
Cheers!
>Obviously it's because said law being strongly enforced would cause such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety, and thus further erode the monopoly on violence the state holds over its citizenry. Cops then have fewer en passants they can pull when they don't follow procedure, etc etc. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.
There might very well be laws like that. However, let me offer a non-controversial and obvious one. Speed limits. Many places have 65mph listed as a speed limit. Everyone knows you are not allowed to go faster. However very few place will pull you over for going 66mph or even 70mph. If they started pulling over everyone going 70 in a 65 there would not be "such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety" because we all know and they all knew they were breaking the law. But it isn't enforced in an authoritarian way because we have different vehicles, sometimes you need to pass, and frankly 70 and 65 just aren't that big of a problem. But almost everyone would agree that we do need a speed limit, although they might not agree on the number and a number has to be picked.
Now, I don't want to assume your political leanings, but I am getting some strong libertarian vibes. And you seem like a nice and thoughtful person, so maybe bad ideas don't even occur to you because you are honest and just don't think that way. But imagine, or go ask grok, some other ways this could work out. And while you are at it, imagine a law that did not effect all citizens the same. Now imagine that a bad law could effect a relatively small group much more than others. In what way could they cause affect a backlash that would quickly get a law repealed in its entirety?
Using money to incentivize any public action on behalf of the government should be a sort of last-resort situation where it makes sense and the people already being paid to do it can't for some reason. This is a very libertarian idea, in fact. A more reasonable idea, although much less libertarian, would be to pass a law that makes it where cars can not idle for more than a specified amount of time in certain situations, but that would come with its own can of worms don't you think? And I personally wouldn't be for such a law. In fact I am against the snitch on idlers law. If someone wants to pay $7 a gallon for gas to set there and idle it away, why shouldn't they be able to? How is it different than them driving the same gas away?
Scared of MAGA targeting brown people with this type of social enforcement
Not really. If perfect, ubiquitious enforcement were possible, our laws would probably look very different.
Like letting the police install a permanent speed trap on your property or even pay for the privilege of them doing so. I'd bet that'd curb a lot of speeding in short order
If you want to curb speeding, the solution looks much the same: Pay reporters some portion of the fines collected from the speeder. You will very quickly see a cottage industry of Internet connected dashcams and on-board AI solutions spring up, because it's practically free money if you drive safely yourself for long enough. Pretty soon nobody will be speeding, simply because you never know who or what is watching.
This is a set of economic-legal policies I've been writing about here and there for a long time. It's great stuff.
What a miserable society that would be to live in.
You also have it backwards because it already reliably makes society better for you. Take the case of Biogen employee Michael Bawduniak, who spent seven years documenting covert payments that steered doctors toward Biogen’s multiple‑sclerosis drugs illegally. When the United States Department of Justice settled the case for $900 million in 2022, Bawduniak received roughly $266 million, or about 30% of the federal proceeds, under the False Claims Act. It's a very similar mechanism, and anyone you may know who suffers from multiple sclerosis has likely had their treatment options materially improved thanks to Bawduniak's actions. But those kinds of actions only happen when you have the right mechanisms in place, to reward people who do the right thing.
But culturally speaking, America is only fine with applying this idea to the upper-upper class, like billionaires and hedge fund managers.
It is absolutely unacceptable to apply surveillance tech to arbitrary middle class citizens. Full stop.
I will absolutely speak up to ensure this value is upheld in American society.
Edit: Thought about this more and I think Americans have almost no mercy for businesses but extreme mercy for the average citizen. It's not cool to snitch on the average citizen for a crime that involves citations and fines. It is totally cool to do that to a business.
You are entitled to your opinion of course but it just seems extremely arbitrary.
I think the idea is vaguely that the upper-upper class statistically must've done something wrong or have the power to cause extreme harm, therefore it's okay to snitch on them but not your regular Joe.
I'm just espousing the standard American middle class views about freedom here. Not trying to argue they are sound or rational.
EDIT: I've been away from the States for too long. I was indeed thinking about speed bumps, not traps. Traps are cameras, and they therefore get a thumbs up from me in the beautiful bounties-on-everything-we-care-about future.
Are you talking about speed bumps?
This is wild demonstration of misaligned incentive structures at every level.
Don’t like getting reported by randos with apps? Don’t idle.
My only beef with the law itself, is that the fines need to be income-linked - otherwise it’s only illegal if you’re poor.
Don't worry though, every ticket the company got was billed right back to buildings we were working at in another form. The balance sheet always wins.
Decentralizing traffic enforcement is a win-win. Bravo to NYC for opening this sort of program and OP for turning it into an "efficient free market".
Will try it out soon. Bookmarked.
Look at China as a perfect example of what happens when you apply this idea at scale.
PS: Yet I do find OP's idea reminding me of China. Having a society that polices itself (just in China it's more about thought, not behavior) is definitely not a thing I would enjoy.
Members of this “get off my sidewalk!” group often fail to realize this: Did you study to become a pedestrian? Did you go to a bicycle driving school to acquire a permit to operate one? Was an exam at all given in order to use public foot or bike paths?
If the answer is no, then you aren’t held to the same standards as cars, which are heavily regulated and require licenses to operate.
Obeying road signs for bicycle and pedestrians are suggestions, rarely enforced, and the worst case scenario is usually you hurt yourself. Your ability to hurt others has an upper bound that society deems acceptable.
Win-win for who exactly? Maybe we need to decentralize and AI-accelerate construction permit reporting too. Your backyard fence looks DIY and not up to code and your porch light looks like a fire hazard.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/30/23328442/france-ai-swimmi... ("French government uses AI to spot undeclared swimming pools — and tax them / The government used machine learning to scan aerial photos of properties")
Society at large? All the people who don't have the breathe the fumes of some garbage commercial vehicle.
> Your backyard fence looks DIY
Provided it's up for code, whether it was "done yourself" or not doesn't matter.
> your porch light looks like a fire hazard.
Absolutely this should be reported.
What do you think of China, where the application of this idea is widespread?
Doesn’t impact the overall usefulness of the program very much IMO — I just didn’t add special handling for school/park reports like I would’ve before they made that change.
https://dec.ny.gov/environmental-protection/air-quality/cont...
Although they don't require you to actually take a 5 minute video it is overwhelmingly likely that most people don't pull out there phone every time a vehicle stops in NYC so that most 3 minute videos are liable to be of 5 minute idles.
There are obviously 2 types of problem children cheaters and dummies. It's easier for cheaters to take a 1 minute video since even those who don't intend to idle for any substantial time may pause a moment. For dummies making them actually sit there and film 3 minutes decreases the chance that they will accidentally misunderstand how much time has passed. People are heavily biased towards their own benefits and are liable to miss-perceive 4.5 minutes as 5. Less possible when he pulled out his phone at the 2+ minute mark and now has to wait 3 minutes to have enough.
You could also have multiple references to validate via crowdscoring.
You can also find people who are bad actors to decentivize them from mass reporting.
This had inspired me to try and make a few apps for civic use, but I discovered that many of the accessible web tools for my city have rules against bots. For example, the city maintains a list of locations and dates where parking is temporarily restricted for short term things like construction, but I can’t scrape it.
I really wish that the government (at any level) made more serviced and data available as APIs or digital formats. The government is usually bad at building/buying websites and services, and I’d have done it for free (or for $0.99 on the App Store).
How does your city deal with graffitis? mine is plagued with graffitis and I can't see how they can be fought. It takes too much resources to remove them in a timely manner and impossible to catch the perpetrators.
The city really just has a queue of cleanup sites and priorities locations that are high visibility or important, like school yards or transit infrastructure. An elementary school nearby had its mural destroyed by graffiti, and it was cleaned up within a day.
https://upriseri.com/the-inequality-of-fines-how-monetary-pe...
That's a great idea, as long as the hard separation goes both ways with bikes no longer being allowed in car lanes.
There already exists roads where cyclists can't be: Highways/motorways. If the problem is cyclists in the road, that solves itself by building better infrastructure. Where there's adequate cycling infrastructure, cyclists prefer to use it. Where there's lacking or none, one should of course be able to use the road. Otherwise it would be a de facto ban on cycling, which I'm sure was your point?
It's from a combination of getting stuck behind cyclists going really slowly and with no opportunity to pass them, and from so much blatantly illegal behavior by them like running red lights without even slowing down.
And as you say you don’t want to be in the position where a whale costs you $50 by submitting a crazy number of requests.
Maybe these are big-scale problems though :)
Do you really want to live in a society where we're monitored for even the slightest infractions at all times and automatically punished regardless of any circumstances that might explain the behavior?
The idling regulations are based on real harm, and the reporting requirements include things like recording video to prove that the car you're reporting didn't start idling in the last 5 seconds, but has, in fact, been doing that for 3 minutes or longer, or 1 minute or longer adjacent to a school.
More info here: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...
You have to actually submit a 3:01 (or 1:01) minute video as part of the report for that to be actionable.
And, yes, I would really, really want to live in a society where unnecessary idling is not allowed. And if I was living next to a street corner where that happens regularly, I would be on that street corner recording videos any time I'd have free time, and more, if I had babies, who are especially vulnerable to air pollution, living with me.
Punishment likelihood depends on how likely the crime is to be detected in the first place. Older societies such as medieval Europe or Qing dynasty era China used the death penalty for so many seemingly minor things, and this formula was a big part of why. State authorities at that period of human history had a very low chance of actually detecting something like forgery. So in order to deter criminals they had to ratchet up just how big the potential punishment actually was if you did get caught.
Conversely, as our societies have improved their ability to detect crimes, our stomach for policies like “Forgery is punishable by death” has rightfully taken a nosedive. So, yes, the trend I've seen across the centuries suggests to me I might well prefer to live in a society where the detection rate is higher than it currently is. There's no reason to suspect we've hit upon the optimal point for human flourishing where we are now.
Having grown up in the city and gone to a public school where over half of my peers had asthma from the heavy truck route next to our playground, I welcome any kind of financial realignment between drivers (especially commercial drivers) and their behavior.
Also basics driving rules like zip merge will make traffic better.
I recall reading about it years ago because some enterprising individuals decided that the revenue from catching random violations in-the-wild wasn't enough, so they started to deliberately create dangerous situations, where breaking a traffic law (which would then be recorded and submitted for a reward) was the only safe option for the victim. Unfortunately I haven't been able to quickly find a source to back this up.
There's a whole literature on this topic in economics under mechanism design. They've been a longstanding research interest of mine, I consider it almost like the land value tax of legal enforcement by this point.
So we end up with anarcho-tyranny, where 'real' crime is policed poorly, if at all - but loads of resources and tech are deployed aggressively policing+punishing mostly-law-abiding people for the most minor of infractions.
Edit: I've unflagged some of the others, but here are some examples of the kind I mean:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349249
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349183
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44348874
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44348759
Everyone goes on tilt sometimes; it happens. But please stop.
Forcing motorists to pay for minor infractions is the entire point of the app.
Certainly, if you have evidence of murder or something, please do report it.
But for an idling vehicle?
Note that these laws are only targeting idling while parked, rather than during normal use, such as at a traffic light. This is called "true-idling" or "long-duration" idling.
Has anybody considered how much CO2 or other greenhouse gases are actually released by "true-idling" or "long-duration" idling vehicles, either individually or in aggregate? I spent a few minutes researching it with an LLM and couldn't come up with much. Most of the information and numbers I got were for ALL idling, including during normal driving like at a traffic light. My guess based on that is that it (true idling) is a trivially small amount of CO2 compared to the overall.
But it's plenty to earn yourself a nice payoff at the expense of your hard working delivery driver!
I don’t know about measurable effects but I hate when I pass a long-idling truck and can taste it in the air.
And I hate living in a surveillance state.
Sure, but it's a different kind of dystopia to have commercial vehicles idling and fouling the air outside of normal driving. As described where you have to capture 3 minutes of idling (1 minute near schools) and assuming most people take a while to notice, rather than starting the timer immediately when the vehicle stops, it seems like a reasonable way to enhance compliance.
Idling while parked may not be a large contribution to total emissions, but it's harder to justify than idling in normal operation, and easier to enforce against, so there you go. Sometimes refrigerated transport more or less needs to idle to keep the contents at temperature, not sure if there's exceptions for that or if they just need to retrofit with more insulation or batteries to run the compressor or etc in order to comply.
Idling at lights probably gets reduced by auto start/stop in new vehicles as well as congestion charges reducing traffic and probably dwell time at lights. Auto start/stop isn't a universally loved thing; it makes some cars really frustrating to use, but when done well, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff to reduce unneccesary emissions.
I'm unsure if you were obliquely referring to this, or if you were intending to suggest a fictional idea. But what you described is already a thing that's happening in mainland China,
> "In the southern city of Shenzhen, Chinese authorities have launched a new surveillance system loaded with facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and a big database to crack down on jaywalking as well as other crimes."
> "As a result, photographs of pedestrians caught in the act, along with their names and social identification numbers, are now instantly displayed on LED screens installed at Shenzhen road junctions."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/china-deploys-ai-came... ("Chinese authorities use facial recognition, public shaming to crack down on jaywalking, criminals")
How about a pollution credit trading program then? If my efficient car produces way less pollution than your gas-guzzling truck, I should get the room to idle until I reach our agreed max.
A technological snitch program is a weird and messed up outcome when we ignore the base problems.
But, cool technical achievement. I’m scared that a similar parking snitch program is all too easy as well. Car parked 3.5 hours in a 3hr max neighbourhood? Get them fined and get a sweet bounty! Thanks I hate it.
It's both. A car idling outside your window is still gonna be an issue even if the planet somehow solve the big stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
It seems pretty clear that laws will be enforced more in future, the obvious response is to go prune the laws to get rid of the ones that we actually aren’t OK with being enforced.
Meanwhile, industrial-scale shoplifting, hard drugs, sex crimes, riots. No automated enforcement possible there, let alone profitable automated enforcement.
One idea I play with is “police 2.0” where you can dispatch a small fast drone to a crime scene, and follow the perp from a safe distance. A lot of crimes could be solved this way (eg car chases, illegal dirt bike gangs, petty robbery etc).
I really don’t want pervasive surveillance, but perhaps there is a middle ground where response times are fast enough that you can be purely reactive to a 911 call/app.
Feels quite slippery-slope though. I think we should expect increased debate on the social contract as these new systems become more capable and the “enforcement gap” becomes larger.
I think this is dystopian. Paying people to rat out their fellow citizens. Nightmarish.
What if this idea was applied to the laws ICE is trying to enforce? Would you think that's dystopian?
But you make money off people snitching.
And you're setting the stage for something far worse, imo.
I see this as in the same vein as SEC whistleblower awards, which I’ve never heard described as dystopian. Businesses just don’t have the same expectation of privacy that individuals do.
I'd rather live in truck fumes than a hyper-automated snitch surveillance state.
maybe take a break man. not healthy.
It even pissed people off enough that one of the mods started commenting about my own personal projects that have nothing to do with this lmao
Oh and I guess it did work because now it's down to 28, almost off the front page. Much lower than where it was before
I bet that the friction in the submission process was deliberately added to avoid abuses, but maybe it's just incompetence. Depending on the reason, this app can be either good or against the spirit of the rule.
However, a lot of the comments tending in that direction have been (1) generic and (2) flamebait and/or fulminatey, which are bad for HN threads and against the site guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But I know this app is truly evil in my system of morality.
AI art can be very soulless. Very dehumanizing. In certain sense.
But those two qualities are undeniably attached to surveillance states. In all senses. There is no argument against that.
This is one of the few things I feel very strongly about and I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it. His idea is actively harming what makes America a good place to live in. And his idea is what makes China a bad place to live in. I'm not just going to sit here and say nothing.
I don't care if this negative EV for my own personal interests. I felt the need to speak up and people agree with me. Hopefully his post gets taken down.
This is a valid show hn - if you can’t comment on it reasonably just don’t comment or find a thread where the general surveillance topic is actually the topic.
I don't care about you or your opinion. Ban me.
If you want an example of widespread application of this idea in a society, look at China. I rest my case.
Btw, "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I've been looking for an app to donate my time as a volunteer meter maid.
If we can't prevent wars between nations, there's no hope of the planet coming together to the extent required to manipulate the climate in a meaningful way.
Also when the posts start getting dyspeptic-meta like this, something has gone wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Another example in the same vein (but no financial reward for reporting!) is the Solve SF app:
https://www.solvesf.com/