Show HN: Report idling vehicles in NYC (and get a cut of the fines) with AI
I've filed a few reports, and I found the process frustrating and error-prone. The forms are fiddly, there's way too much information that needs to be copied down from the video by hand, you have to use a third-party app to take a timestamped video and a different app to compress it before uploading, and approximately none of it can be done on your phone — the device you probably used to record your video in the first place.
I built Idle Reporter to make filing complaints into a five-minute process that you can do entirely from your phone.
Idle Reporter uses AI to automatically extract all the required information and screenshots from the video and fill out the form for you. It compresses your video, adds the required screenshots, and uploads the whole thing to DEP. All you have to do is log in, give it a final check, and submit.
The AI features cost me money to run, so I put those behind a subscription ($5.99/month, which can pay for itself after a single report). There's a one-week free trial so you can test it out. All the other features — including a fully-featured timestamp camera, which other apps charge for, and an editor for filling out the forms manually and submitting in a single step — will be free forever, as a service to the community.
The app is iOS-only for now — part of this was an exercise in learning SwiftUI in my spare time.
Check it out on the App Store and let me know what you think!
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...
[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-idling-law-report...
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.
Think bigger. If the activity were really a money-maker, then it will inevitably be scaled and industrialized. A cottage industry of snitching would spring up. If that industry got sufficiently wealthy and politically powerful, we'd see all kinds of "easy-bounty" laws getting enacted to allow these companies to further sponge up fines from the public.
If speeding fines were shared with whoever reported them, I guarantee 100% that companies would buy real estate every 10 miles along every freeway and put up speeding cameras to automate it.
(EDIT: Looks like you also already predicted the speed trap cottage industry in another comment. Oh, well, I'll leave this one up too)
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?
Conversely, under an enforcement regime where everyone is genuinely scared to go higher than 65, the worst case scenario is... Everyone does 65. Fewer accidents, and fewer fatalities from those accidents. Best case scenario is they rapidly revise up to 70 - 75 - wherever.
Re/ "imagine that a bad law could effect a relatively small group much more than others", I think we would have to define more closely what a 'bad law' actually is to answer that first. Under this kind of fine-based regime, it would have to be something that targets a small group, unfairly, and manages to consistently extract a lot of money from them, which requires they have a lot of money to reliably extract in the first place - otherwise it stops being worth the effort to target them specifically.
I guess you could imagine making lottery scratch tickets a fineable offense, and thereby target pensioners unfairly. That's the closest I got after 5 minutes of thinking about it.
Re/ using money to incentivize public action - we have clashing moral intuitions on this, I definitely don't see it as a last resort. In fact I would far prefer it to be the first resort. Money is a much more efficient, scalable, precise, and robust way of handling things than e.g. sending people to prison (which we still have to pay for, by the way, prisons aren't cheap).
Re/ the idler's law itself - You're allowed to be against it personally, that's fine. The people of New York City voted in favor of it, and they probably have good reasons for this that mostly only make sense to themselves. Personally, I've been to New York, and seen how cramped those streets are. It doesn't surprise me that some schmuck holding up half of 6th Avenue should be made to pay for it - they are likely causing thousands of dollars of cash flow loss per second because on who's late for work because of them. But even then, I don't live there. I don't actually have a good sense of this kind of thing. I defer to the wisdom of the locals here. Do as the Romans do.
Then do you arrest all people going 71?
> I think we would have to define more closely what a 'bad law' actually is to answer that first. Under this kind of fine-based regime, it would have to be something that targets a small group, unfairly, and manages to consistently extract a lot of money from them
Is suspect everyone can hypothesize a small group they belong to. So make up one that you belong to and imagine a group coming into power in the legislature where you live that makes that kind of law. The money itself doesn't need to be a large amount (what might be "a lot" to you and I might be different for different people) to make it oppressive and frankly a weapon for the police and government to use.
>Re/ the idler's law itself ... The people of New York City voted in favor of it
Correct. I don't agree with it but the local people do. This is the both the blessing and curse of our government and the exact situation where some people can can use this pay-for-snitching technique for good or bad. If it works for them then so be it. I don't have to like it. I don't like a lot of stuff. And some stuff I do like others don't. My original argument is that using money as an incentive to turn citizens against each other is a very slippery slope. In his case it might be great for them. I understand that you and I disagree on this point and there is likely nothing I can say or you can say to make the other suddenly change position and I respect you defending your thought process on this. But it is nice to be able to have a conversation about something controversial without it spinning into something else. Cheers!
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?
Truly, an obvious win for society....
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?
This is wild demonstration of misaligned incentive structures at every level.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
https://upriseri.com/the-inequality-of-fines-how-monetary-pe...
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.
I would really, really want to live in a society where we aren't being monitored by cameras for every single minute of every day the moment we step outside our homes
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.
Well, history shows us that any system that grants a power to government eventually expands beyond its original use. So you will forgive me for thinking it's a bad idea to start
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.
I don't think "increased government ability to enforce rules and collect fines" is likely to lead to less rules
I would love to be proven wrong
Also basics driving rules like zip merge will make traffic better.
But I also recognize that people are human and make mistakes. I've missed turns before and had to make a decision between a slightly risky u-turn or being stuck going the wrong way for a while. I chose the u-turn after doing my best to ensure I wasn't going to put anyone else at risk
Should I be fined for that?
How about speeding? Basically everyone speeds right? Let's just auto fine everyone for that all the time.
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.
Absolutely. And make sure to give the violator full contact details for the person(s) who reported them. Better yet, set up sites in isolated areas for the violators to "pay" the reporters.
What could go wrong?
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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.
Forcing motorists to pay for minor infractions is the entire point of the app.
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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.
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Another example in the same vein (but no financial reward for reporting!) is the Solve SF app:
https://www.solvesf.com/
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
lol you know you're the one acting in bad faith here. hope you feel better soon
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.
You also called me an asshole. I never called anyone names.
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.
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've been looking for an app to donate my time as a volunteer meter maid.
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Also when the posts start getting dyspeptic-meta like this, something has gone wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html