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

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

#31

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…

> Why not [support bounties for ordinary people to enforce parking?]

Because that kind of thing leads to a lower-trust society, especially when plausibly motivated by personal financial gain

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

#32

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…

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.

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

#33
post #27

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/

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.

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

#34

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…

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.

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

#36

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…

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.

There's a toll road near me that always triple bills me. Am I really going to call and complain about $1.27 a few times a year?

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

#37

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…

> 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.

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

#38

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…

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.

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

#39
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.

Santa Cruz has a history of meter scofflawism - https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/mr-twister-s-mission-of-...

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

#40

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…

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 whe…

San Diego County is run closely aligned with the military. Any chance that "active duty" or other sorts of status are part of this story ?

Second part of San Diego County -- I believe they have a stated goal of tracking all vehicles at all times in some automated way.

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