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...
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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).
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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.
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.
That's a great idea, as long as the hard separation goes both ways with bikes no longer being allowed in car lanes.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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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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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.
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
If you want an example of widespread application of this idea in a society, look at China. I rest my case.
Another example in the same vein (but no financial reward for reporting!) is the Solve SF app:
https://www.solvesf.com/
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I've been looking for an app to donate my time as a volunteer meter maid.
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.
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I never went back, and won't ever go back to NY, for any purpose. Many drivers feel the same and refuse to go. If ever NY became severed from supply lines, I'd always remember my time there.
Guess it's time to gray out now. So long.
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Also when the posts start getting dyspeptic-meta like this, something has gone wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We could even bring shame back. You walk against red light and your face gets plastered around billboards as named criminal.
Next step would be to introduce some type of social credit like credit score. Too many minor infractions and your rights get removed. Eventually electric locks in your home would refuse to open until you do enough positive unpaid voluntary work online.
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")