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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

#61

Post by jeffbee »

potato3732842 wrote: post #59
jmspring wrote: post #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, w…

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.)

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

#62

Post by potato3732842 »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #51
akira2501 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 v…

The bus lanes are not useless, they have measurably improved commutes, and parking in them is in fact illegal, so why the air quotes?

Measurable and positive does not mean worthwhile. (Though I suspect that many bus lanes are in fact worthwhile but that's beside the point.)

Furthermore, there's always someone who benefits and will lie with statistics to keep the gravy going.

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

#63

Post by llamaimperative »

vundercind wrote: post #53
llamaimperative wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What? In the US? Where?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Amendment_to_the_United_... 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.

Wow! TIL

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

#64

Post by potato3732842 »

czinck wrote: post #23
doctorpangloss wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.c…

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.

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

#65

Post by potato3732842 »

jeffbee wrote: post #61
potato3732842 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#66

Post by Wowfunhappy »

woodruffw wrote: post #24

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!

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

#67

Post by potato3732842 »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #38
suzzer99 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prosec…

>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.

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

#68

Post by krapht »

HPsquared wrote: post #55
bobthepanda wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 uniqu…

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.

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

#69

Post by doctorpangloss »

potato3732842 wrote: post #57
ewoodrich wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> The person on the other end of the phone has near complete discretion and the process is still not auditable or verifiable to you.

Does every administrative process have to go to a plebiscite or a Judge to be valid? Where do you draw the line?

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

#70

Post by woodruffw »

ziptron wrote: post #35

> pay a second company $58 million to outfit an additional 1,000 buses with mobile camera systems How could it be $58k per bus to install a camera?

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.

[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/bus-lane-camera-r...

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