When I lived in California years ago I had a custom 2-letter plate. I gave the car to a relative who switched its registration to another state.
Years later, I got a toll demand from an express lane around LA that had a false positive scan of my plate number—someone else’s partially obscured maybe?
I argued the car was registered elsewhere and wasn’t driven in CA, and they denied the appeal. I asked for evidence but they refused. I tried a FOIA request but it was denied because there’s an exemption for data that reveals individuals’ driving patterns—to get the photo I would have had to show up at an office in LA to show my ID and registration to prove it was my car, which it wasn’t!
CA law allows the plate scanning and dictates the toll violation letter must show the make and model of the vehicle in question. They just look up the DMV records for the scanned plate. They’re not doing any kind of verification that the vehicle matches. They have 100% faith in the infallibility of these scanners with no appeals process.
I got hit by this too - a "toll evasion" from a similar looking plate (and E vs an F), but a completely different style of car (Truck vs Hatchback) let alone different make/model.
And I guess as they drive through 3 cameras that all made the same mistake, I received 3 notices of "Toll Evasion" on the same day for incidents that happened within a few hours of each other.
And the third included a notice that said as this was my third violation, they may file a lien against my vehicle and repossess it.
Sure, they immediately dropped them when I challenged them, but I often spend multiple months away from the country, I can certainly see me coming back to a repossessed car if I hadn't challenged it in the allowed time.
Inscrutable, impossible-to-win appeals processes seem to go hand in hand with automated enforcement mechanisms. Otherwise the financials don't work.
This may be an area where govt needs to set some kind of standard of talking to a live human and getting a straightforward explanation of why an appeal is denied. EU will probably lead the way if it happens.
It's not much different from anything involving the legal system. If everyone charged with anything ranging from a fine to a criminal misdemeanor just requested either a trial or an administrative hearing, the system would vanish overnight.
I did once discover that in at least one jurisdiction criminal charges were not guaranteed a jury trial, only a bench trial was given. The judge in that circumstance is the prosecutor from another nearby jurisdiction.
At least you get to look a human being in the eye in actual court.
I ran into the buzzsaw of Amazon's KDP self-publishing fraud detection bots, which decided that my Kindle was plagiarizing my paperback (duh, it's the same book). I went through a series of Kafkaesque email appeals — all denied with progressively vaguer justifications. By the final appeal, there was literally no concrete point left to even argue against, just vague wording about creating a negative experience for readers.
I'm not sure a human ever looked at my case. Or if they did, they had a huge incentive to just rubber-stamp the bot's decision and move on. The whole experience was soul-crushing, and I didn't even have that much at stake compared to some. I hope the architects and implementers of this system run into something similar someday so they know how it feels. The only recourse I've ever seen work is to tweet or create a blog post and have it go viral.
>If everyone charged with anything ranging from a fine to a criminal misdemeanor just requested either a trial or an administrative hearing, the system would vanish overnight.
That's not a valid excuse for "due process" being completely unfair and placing unreasonable burdens on the accused.
> I did once discover that in at least one jurisdiction criminal charges were not guaranteed a jury trial, only a bench trial was given. The judge in that circumstance is the prosecutor from another nearby jurisdiction.
TL;DR the Sixth's right to jury trial doesn't apply for criminal charges carrying less than sixth months maximum sentence—even if there are multiple such charges that may add up to more than that.
Gonna go out on a limb and guess that plenty of US jurisdictions don't voluntarily pay extra money to make those jury trials if they aren't forced to.
Agreed, and I'd go further than that: we shouldn't be charging prisoners "rent" or for food or whatever. If it's important enough to imprison someone then we the taxpayers should cover the cost.
Wait til you find out that even if charges are dismissed against you, or a not guilty finding occurs, that Florida will still charge you for your jail or prison stay (and potentially block you from renewing your license until they are paid or you're on an arrangement you are complying with).
I'm not really sure suing a bankrupt company that is immune from such procedures under state law is a good idea. What am I going to do, pursue a RICO case against them?
Interesting how different our experiences were in a similar situation.
I had a false positive FasTrak ticket from the San Diego area for a timeframe I was living in Sacramento that was tossed (including gigantic late penalties) after a phone call explaining I was at work hundreds of miles away at the time.
I was all ready to go with Google Maps Timeline location data but they just took me at my word when they saw where the car was registered.
The person on the other end of the phone has near complete discretion and the process is still not auditable or verifiable to you. They could make whatever they want up and you wouldn't know.
You probably got lucky and called in a month when budgets weren't tight and they weren't trying hard to squeeze out every penny so they just waved it instead of giving you the runaround.
For adjudicating traffic tolls? Why do you think election is going to produce a good outcome? Some jurisdictions would collect zero revenue while others would refuse any appeal on principle.
You're thinking one step on the line. If a jurisdiction refused appeals regularly, the elected official doing that would become more likely to get replaced.
> the elected official doing that would become more likely to get replaced
I’m saying there are jurisdictions where this would be desirable to voters. Any area where most tickets are issued to non-locals, for example. If I were running in those races, I’d advertise my zero clemency attitude towards outsiders tearing up our streets or whatever.
Same in SF; I used the FastTrak chat for a wrong overdue charge (I was never sent a notice) and they just cancelled. Every notice also comes with a photo of your car, so not sure what happened to og or when.
If you mean me then no I am not military (or been to San Diego at all in over a decade). The fact that my FasTrak account only had tolls for Bay Area bridges and nothing in SoCal (other than the erroneous one) probably made my story more believable.
I don't have a representative because I don't live in CA. I did contact one of the elected officials that oversees the Orange County Transportation Authority and their office did eventually get it dismissed.
There is an appeals process but it first requires me submitting proof that I wasn't driving in the express lane to them, rather than forcing them to produce any evidence (which, if they even had a photo, would immediately exonerate me). They would not accept my statement that the car was re-registered out of state and then sold, even though the CA DMV records confirmed that the registration expired years prior.
If I did submit proof and they still denied it, I could request an administrative review, but first I have to pay the fine as a deposit, which would be refunded to me if I won.
Of course, all of the reviewers work for the organization whose scanners falsely accused me in the first place. There is no independent traffic court for this expressway.
Some years back Santa Cruz updated the meter maids / parking enforcement to GPS enabled smart devices and they would still drive around, get out, take pictures (when someone was in violation). My wife and I were sitting outside a restaurant where such a vehicle was being photo'd. This particular meter person was known to be .. not nice. While said person was behind vehicle (old vw bus) and out of site of the meter, we slipped a couple of quarters in and got back to our seat.
Watching the reaction (they already had a couple of photos) was priceless. Said person questioned about 3 different groups (myself included) and all played dumb and had a good laugh when done. The vehicle owner saw the interaction from the farmer's market across the way and bought a round for a couple of tables.
I know someone who deflated the tires on their Jeep to get around a violation ticket for bumper height (i.e. the kind of thing they only ever enforce as a pretext for fishing). He asked the cop to re-measure. Cop was confused and mad.
It's amazing how mechanized scofflaws believe they are uniquely above the law, and that dodging law enforcement is a personal victory. I think it's a sad commentary on the deterioration of public behavior in America (and this is almost exclusively an American thing ... in Germany a lifted Jeep would be seized and destroyed on its first day on the road.)
>It's amazing how mechanized scofflaws believe they are uniquely above the law, and that dodging law enforcement is a personal victory. I think it's a sad commentary on the deterioration of public behavior in America (and this is almost exclusively an American thing ... in Germany a lifted Jeep would be seized and destroyed on its first day on the road.)
Don't be obtuse. It's not about the mechanization. It's about the capricious enforcement. If you weren't so blinded by bias you'd see that.
I hope you get dogpiled for jaywalking or some other "we only ever enforce it as a pretext" violation. It might knock your moral compass back into calibration.
Oh yes, I'm sure that would be normal in, checks notes, oh you've gotta be joking, Germany, a country certainly not known for a recent proclivity for dangerous authoritarianism.
I didn't saw about quantity, just cyclists can be unpredictable - I bike several thousand miles a year. When I used to commute to San Francisco, my order of concern on the road was cyclists, muni, cabs, everyone else.
And yet drivers kill several dozen, permanently maim hundreds, and injured thousands every year in San Francisco alone. I only know of one case where a pedestrian died after being struck by a bicycle.
Despite the "A.I." in the headline, the source of the errors seems to be bad categorical data input and nothing AI related. The same problem likely could've happened with human traffic enforcement if they were given the wrong instructions.
Unless you're on the hype train "all things AI". It's always surprising how many real life problems do not necessarily need a solution based on the buzzwords du jour. All things blockchain, all things microservices, all things as-a-service, all those came and went, washing off the bubbles and leaving behind the (fewer) worthy pieces.
Buzzwords aside, I'm pretty sure the MTA's license recognition here is plain old ALPR, of the kind that's already been in use for municipal fare/toll enforcement for ~15 years.
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." - Charles Babbage
He is answering what a computation engine will do, but not what a "wise" person would do, which is the _the_ test of AI.
The goal of wisdom (and good teaching) is to first correct the faulty assumptions of the questioner that leads them to ask a bad question, and then once they ask a good question, then and _only_ then, provide the answer to the question.
I don't see how Baggage can be considered wrong here as such, when he's giving a simple statement of fact about himself. We don't know whether he attempted to elucidate the questioners assumptions.
However, I always wonder if the questioners might have suspected that the engine was a fake. The original Mechanical Turk was extent in around the same period, although I'm not sure when it's trick was uncovered.
in other recent news, the Alameda County Transit system has enabled "AI" cameras on busses, that will auto-generate violations for civilian vehicles in the bus stop, in the new fast transit dedicated lanes, and who knows where else.
In previous times, Alameda County special officers would issue $500 tickets for letting a passenger out of a private vehicle within a bus stop area. In case you don't know, the bus stops are everywhere, and often are large in busy downtown areas. The joke was that these special officers wore gold braids on their uniform, not to mark seniority, but to mark the amount of money generated !! Witnesses saw four or more tickets given out like that in one hour in a busy downtown area, on a certain day more than ten years ago.
To be blunt, tickets of that value, generated automatically for common violations, is a money printing machine. Alameda County Transit in California cannot be the only ones implementing this across the US and elsewhere.
Just don’t park in a bus stop. It’s not that hard. We have so many parking spaces dedicated for vehicles there is no excuse in Alameda County.
Other comments in this thread complain about the difficulty of finding a legal place to drop people off at a BART station. That has not been my experience: the three Alameda county BART stations I’m most familiar with (Hayward, Fremont, and Warm Springs) all have passenger drop off zones and giant parking lots.
the point of the cameras, to some degree, is to make the common violations stop happening. you don't really have a right to pull over anywhere you want in 'a busy downtown area'.
That's true, though I would argue that, especially around regional transit hubs, at least some number of parking spaces should be converted to pickup/drop-off spaces (3/5/10 minute parking). It's inane how hard it is to find a legal place to drop people off at some BART stations, and surely it's worth sacrificing some small number of parking spots for?
That's not really a compelling argument in a reality in which we allow people to just stop at the end of merge ramps because "whoops, poor/no planning".
I think the title and lede overstate this a bit: it was 2 bus lines (out of >300 in the NYCT system), and of the ~3800 violations issued, under 25% were incorrect.
That's still unacceptable, of course. But the proximate error here appears to not be with incorrect recognition, but with training/monitoring data accidentally being redirected to enforcement.
It's actually much less bad than that. From the video at the top of the article:
• The cameras issued 3,000 tickets which "should have been warnings."
• The cameras issued 800 tickets for "no infraction at all".
So out of 3,800 improperly issued tickets (!), under 25% went to people who were legally parked. The other 75% went to people who broke the law but should have been let off with a warning. As a bus rider, I don't feel so bad for them tbqh.
I don't think we know the total number of properly issued tickets from these cameras, but it's likely much higher!
> According to the New York City Department of Transportation, the city’s automated cameras – including red light cameras, speed cameras, and bus lane cameras – issue more than 40,000 violations per day.
That includes many more types of cameras, but it's also per day!
Sure the cameras don't issue the fines? But even if they do it's actually a human or a group of humans who are responsible regardless of the actual workflow.
Describing it as if the AI is responsible is both clickbait and tends to absolve the humans involved. Allowing the MTA to frame it in this way is a failure of journalism.
Knowing the MTA, I assume "outfit" means "provide a turnkey solution for the buses in the program, including software and staff" not just "slap a camera on a bus."
This is backed up by an earlier report on ABLE[1], which was the earlier program that this one (ACE) is built on: hardware was 1/3rd of the net cost to the MTA in that program.
also keep in mind this is automotive grade stuff in relatively harsh conditions (the front of a bus); it needs to be more rugged than your average camera
Surely it's just a dash cam with a button and maybe some kind of comms module. There are many mass-market dashcams with a 'record' button that saves a time period before and after pressing the button, it's pretty standard usage. The only new thing is sending the video on, and making sure the time/location are correct (many cameras do this via GPS already - standard usage). I'm not seeing what is so expensive or unique.
* How many years of service are included (both for the data plan and just repairs when someone smashes a bus camera). Employing people to fix/replace cameras could easily cost hundreds of thousands per year
* Where does the video go? Redundant storage in geographically disparate areas?
* How long is video retained?
* R&D costs?
* Does the price include manual human review?
* There was also some drama where the 2 vendors sued each other, idk if that has any impact on the prices
* The tickets during the pilot made millions of dollars per year, do the cameras pay for themselves?
* How much efficiency are they gaining if the program results in fewer blocked busses?
A bus goes through many more miles and hours of operation than the vast majority of cars. Most cars are parked for the vast majority of the day, and sometimes in covered garages.
And how long do those cameras last? The feds only fund bus replacements at twelve years or 500,000 miles.
Unlike most other parts of the bus, this part isn't mission-critical and presumably is easy to replace. It doesn't need to be made to the same durability standard as, say, the engine.
I have doubts this is actually that profitable. More likely the company is rolling their labor overhead into the per-camera pricing. It's a small order too, only 1000 cameras.
I mean I still think this is a good idea. Seems like a combination of poor communication and probably an incomplete understanding of edge cases but illegal parking is a huge problem in NYC and even though there's a snitching program I think the scale can't be addressed without some level of automation. Obviously there are concerns with these sorts of things like misuse of data and whatnot but I don't think we're living in 1984 just because red light cameras exist.
If you prevent government from launching technologies for every software bug / mistake, you will get a bloated government which will do everything manually increasing it's cost to taxpayers and decrease in quality of services.
The key is still to launch fast and iterate over bugs especially in the realm of traffic / parking violations which at the most causes annoyances to people ( I mean the same people are willing to sit in front of Holland Tunnel for an hour )
Seems like the premise you’re going with here is a false dichotomy.
There’s no reason this project had to issue parking violations from launch - it could issue soft warnings and get the same feedback from impacted civilians to fix the issues before causing them undue distress.
> The cameras also failed to realize that both the M79 and Bx35 bus routes were still in the “warning” phase of a new enforcement pattern – which means even legitimate infractions should not have resulted in monetary penalties.
> Would you support bounties for ordinary people to enforce parking?
Honestly, why not? Let people take a photo of the offending vehicle, picture of the license plate and VIN number and tag the violation. Submit with a copy of your New York ID, and use that to filter out spam and nonsense reporters.
Hell, pay a bounty for submissions that result in the city collecting a fine. (You can deduct bad submissions from said bounties.)
Do you park in NYC? I don't think a single photograph is going to convey sufficient information to make it clear that someone is violating parking rules, many of which are temporal.
I think it would also be weird to penalize people for reports that were ultimately un-actionable. Can you point to any government function that has a similar mechanism?
> don't think a single photograph is going to convey sufficient information to make it clear that someone is violating parking rules, many of which are temporal
Why does it need to be a single photo?
> weird to penalize people for reports that were ultimately un-actionable
To the extent I suggested penalties, it's only in reducing bounties payable. That's less a penalty than recognition of costs.
For what it's worth, that's already a thing in NYC. NYC shares the ticket revenue for illegally idling vehicles with the reporter, and so some people have made 6 figures in one year reporting idling vehicles[1]. There was a push to get a similar provision in a recent bill about illegal parking in bus and bike lanes, but they ended up just allowing citizen complaints with no bounty payout.
That guy's continued breathing is a testament to how good NYC's surveillance dragnet is or at least how good people think it is.
I can't imagine doing what that guy does at the scale he does. Like you can only wrong so many people until you run across the guy for whom you are the final straw. Though I guess that might be why he mostly runs a ring these days instead of being on the street.
Nobody is going kill someone for reporting idling trucks. The drivers of these trucks don't care; the company tells them to idle and swallows the fine (typically bartered down in bulk).
If you go around doing it you'll make a name for yourself. Couriers, ubers, delivery drivers, they all have social media. Eventually you'll run across the guy who "wrong pedals" you.
Sure, I suppose it could happen in that case. There's no public evidence of any such occurrence, however; most of the city's truck traffic is big companies, and I don't see why any driver would risk prison time to stave off an idling ticket that Amazon, etc. is just going to negotiate down in court anyways.
Pretty much everyone who depends on small business in NYC hates the government and law enforcement of NYC and sees them as revenuers (Louis Rossman covers this in detail on his youtube channel, to mention someone who's respected here on HN). The idea that someone would help them for a cut is incredibly disgusting to most people who live in this world.
It's incredibly foreseeable that some guy in the cab of a box truck who's distracted with his dispatch iPad looks up to see some guy taking pictures, puts two and two together and puts the truck in drive. They don't hire middle class techies to drive these trucks. Your morals don't translate to onto some 20yo guy from Newark. And they also don't translate into his hotheaded 16yo helper who runs with a less than law abiding crowd and you didn't see come out of the building just behind.
I've lived here my whole life, and I know a fair number of people who drive trucks (and cabs, and do food delivery) for a living. Again: it's possible, but I have never heard of anybody even getting a beatdown over this, much less getting killed.
> Like I said, the risk ain't worth my life.
Then don't take it! But I don't think the evidence supports treating the average truck driver as a psycho who's one idling ticket away from vehicular manslaughter.
Edit: as a case in point: Kuntzman[1] has been going around the city fixing car - including plenty of cop car - license plates for years. I think the worst he's gotten is verbal abuse, and he's doing something much more overt and aggressive.
> you will get a bloated government which will do everything manually
Like creating useless bus lanes? Then creating useless programs to write tickets to those "parked illegally" in bus lanes? Then creating useless digital waste finding a "better way" to write these pointless tickets over a pointless lane?
> The key is still to launch fast
The key is to get rid of things that don't work and can't provide worthwhile value to the _majority_ of tax payers.
By how much? 1%, 5%... or? It's measured so what's the measurement?
> and parking in them is in fact illegal
And all you have to prove this is a snapshot. Which are not accurate and is the basis for the entire thread here. And people who didn't commit any crime have been charged. So there is clearly an open question as to how many of these pictures appear to be illegal versus how many actually are.
> so why the air quotes?
Those are actual quotes and you've projected your assumptions into my actions. Did it harm your ability to understand what I wrote? If not then why make an issue of it?
Years later, I got a toll demand from an express lane around LA that had a false positive scan of my plate number—someone else’s partially obscured maybe?
I argued the car was registered elsewhere and wasn’t driven in CA, and they denied the appeal. I asked for evidence but they refused. I tried a FOIA request but it was denied because there’s an exemption for data that reveals individuals’ driving patterns—to get the photo I would have had to show up at an office in LA to show my ID and registration to prove it was my car, which it wasn’t!
CA law allows the plate scanning and dictates the toll violation letter must show the make and model of the vehicle in question. They just look up the DMV records for the scanned plate. They’re not doing any kind of verification that the vehicle matches. They have 100% faith in the infallibility of these scanners with no appeals process.