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Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets

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Re: Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets

#121

Post by sjburt »

actuallyalys wrote: post #107
paxy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it goes completely against the interests of local governments. You will be amazed to see how large a portion of your city and police department's budgets are from fines.

That's true of some fines in some places, but to be clear, it's not really true of parking fines in Chicago. The graph in the article indicates there's about $1 million dollars in tickets issued each year. That's around $ .30 per resident and less than one percent of the billions in revenue the city takes in each year ( https://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/obm/sup... , see page 23 in particular) I did…

I believe the y-axis on that graph (assuming you refer to the last graph) is the number of parking tickets, not the dollar amount of fines. So more like $50 to $100 million in parking fines per year.

Re: Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets

#123

Post by rblatz »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #82
vageli wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a plate identifies a vehicle _and_ its owner—not just a vehicle.

A vehicle’s owner is public information in the US. Credit Karma knows the vehicles I own based on DMV records, and recommends me insurance accordingly.

And they know that because your PII (name, address, social) is mapped to a profile, and that profile is also mapped to license plates and Vins. So you can use one to look up the other info in either direction.

Re: Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets

#124

Post by garmaine »

mLuby wrote: post #109
xbryanx wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When is...dear educated technologists...the last time you even slightly considered working for city government? Alas, our best and brightest aren't serving the people. They toil at advertising.

This is something the public can control. Make government positions competitive with corporate ones and you'll get a bunch more talented (and patriotic) "educated technologists" working in government. Likewise with teachers. It's not difficult, just costly.

Not just competitive, but better paying. Take Taiwan and other East Asian countries—government service is desirable, high paying, and a really prestigious job. And lo and behold, their government services really do work very well.

Re: Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets

#125

Post by dmix »

garmaine wrote: post #124
mLuby wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something the public can control. Make government positions competitive with corporate ones and you'll get a bunch more talented (and patriotic) "educated technologists" working in government. Likewise with teachers. It's not difficult, just costly.

Not just competitive, but better paying. Take Taiwan and other East Asian countries—government service is desirable, high paying, and a really prestigious job. And lo and behold, their government services really do work very well.

This is why I'm fiscally conservative while also believing public servants should make market rates. Which also means pushing back against obsessing about total employment counts at x rate but rather focusing on the specific utility of individual agencies, policies, and projects.

Sadly public salaries and jobs in general are low hanging fruit targeted by short-sighted political campaigns while all other gov spending tends to be a black hole with zero measurable ROI and countless professional public grant/gov money consumers well aware of the lack of measurable ROI and crony/who-you-know-in-gov nature of spending. Or worse the phony claims of adopting 'private industry' to side step accountability via public-private arrangements which feature none of the benefits of markets (true competition, state anointed monopolies, market dominance disconnected from value provided to consumers, etc).

Most of which could be blanketly solved by hiring good people (the people who dispense and use the money) and not creating quid-pro-quo incentive systems by underpaying public servants.

Re: Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets

#126

Post by anticensor »

koolba wrote: post #71
bpchaps wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Thanks for posting this, and the kind words. Interesting note about getting data like this - Illinois FOIA allows a requester to submit a SQL as part of their request.. so long as they know the tables and columns within the database ;)

If that’s possible then the first two requests should be: SELECT * FROM information_schema.tables And SELECT * FROM information_schema.columns

Not all SQL products keep their schema searchable, but good try. Your information request has been declined due to unreasonable effort required to answer.

Re: Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets

#127

Post by SahAssar »

forgotmypw wrote: post #42
acct1771 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kind of on a negative streak these days, so forgive me, reader, but...why in god's green earth aren't these the government's hobbies?!

This one change cost the government 60K. If changes like this are implemented all over the city, how will they pay for the IBM contract?

Perhaps they wouldn't need such an expensive contract if they didn't have to process so many tickets caused by bad signage?

Re: Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets

#128

Post by fencepost »

amaccuish wrote: post #41

$190 million?! What does the architecture consist of? A database, some forms and some integrations/api? I'm 90% sure they could have done that with free software and a good support contract with a UNIX provider for far less :/

20+ years ago I was working for a company that provided systems for secure printing of checks (including payroll checks) and direct deposit notifications. One of the things suggested as a possible enhancement was the ability to email people's direct deposit notifications to them, and I got the assignment to research it.

On a technical basis, it's trivial - you already have the data stream that's going to be sent to the printer, generating a PDF wasn't going to be an enormous roadblock (though it wouldn't have been completely trivial as the source data was PCL not PS - did you know that there was handling for that in Ghostscript, at least on the commercially-licensed side?). Encryption of PDFs also possible, either with separately-licensed open source tools or with some closed-source commercial alternatives. Even ignoring the possibility of email being intercepted in transit, encryption would have been a requirement due to the risk of someone walking up to an unattended desk and simply checking that attached PDF for someone's pay info.

The killer? The infrastructure required to assign and allow people to change their passwords including management, training, etc.. By the time you've built that, you're a chunk of the way to simply providing the payroll information within an online HR system instead.

Like the old trope about the first man on Mars being a technician for an unreliable rover, the bulk of the work and cost isn't always where you'd think it would be.

Re: Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets

#129

Post by btrettel »

jimmaswell wrote: post #114
thatjsguy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good lord, just park and walk. Or use that bike lane. Cities have an overabundance of expensive parking [1], which does nothing but waste space and act as giant thermal batteries. Everyone loves complaining about traffic, but we don’t seem to have the political will to do something about it (namely: reduce our dependence on cars). Cities should work to reduce their dependence on cars, not increase it at the expense o…

In my area, there are places you have to "park and walk" to and places you can just drive to. Second category are the only ones that get my business.

How far a walk is too much for you?

Re: Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets

#130

Post by bpchaps »

gok wrote: post #104
bpchaps wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny enough, I submitted one of those to all of the biggest cities in each state for a list of their databases and the columns/tables within each. Pretty much universal rejection. The ones that didn't send me a rejection letter all told me that the cost would be somewhere between $400 and $2,000 to complete the work. While it's nice, and I've spent similar on requests before, it's not something I'm exactly intereste…

Can we do crowdfunding to get that started again?

Yep - I have two ways open now: A donation to my non-profit, Free Our Info, NFP - which is the company I'm submitting requests for DBs' info through (and many other requests): https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_b...

The other's through Muckrock, for specific requests: https://www.muckrock.com/project/tables-and-columns-from-gov... (I'll add more requests to this list tomorrow)

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