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MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

nbcnewyork.com

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Re: MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

#21

Post by soco »

JohnFen wrote: post #15
jejfjfjfjsj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some German cities, bus driver simply hit a camera button when actually being blocked. Sounds like a good filter for this use case?

That seems like a far superior solution.

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.

Re: MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

#22

Post by mistrial9 »

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.

Re: MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

#23

Post by czinck »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #10
SoftTalker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe government tries to do too much.

Okay. Do you drive? Would you support bounties for ordinary people to enforce parking?

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.

[1] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/nyc-anti-idling-la...

Re: MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

#24

Post by woodruffw »

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.

Re: MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

#25

Post by ajb »

croes wrote: post #18
xnx wrote: post #5

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.

Bad training data is pretty much AI related. People outside AI research expect good answers no matter what you give to AI. Or to put it that way, wrong instructions are still natural intelligence related

It's a bit older than that:

"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

Re: MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

#27

Post by pcl »

rgovostes wrote: post #20

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…

Have you sent this note along to your state assembly representative and state senator?

https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/

Re: MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

#28

Post by freejazz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #13
doctorpangloss wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. Do you drive? Would you support bounties for ordinary people to enforce parking?

> 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…

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?

Re: MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

#29

Post by loeg »

freejazz wrote: post #28
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

> I don't think a single photograph is going to convey sufficient information

Seems like the obvious solution is: multiple photos!

> Can you point to any government function that has a similar mechanism?

https://www.motortrend.com/news/nyc-idling-fine-citizen-repo...

Re: MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

#30

Post by JumpCrisscross »

freejazz wrote: post #28
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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