Ottawa Library fines people using unreliable automatic calling system (1994) | Hacker News Reader

Ottawa Library fines people using unreliable automatic calling system (1994)

catless.ncl.ac.uk

50 pointscnst32 comments

Since this is oddly on the front page I want to shout out the OPL for being a great place for everybody. I love libraries. There are so few places you can go with no expectation that you will purchase something.

OPL also has a $100k makerspace available at the Centerpointe location with multiple 3D printers,scanners, and laser cutters. All available for free (if you can book a spot!)

For real, the OPL is awesome. Great spaces and they even rent out video games.

The author mentions parking tickets as a possible future automatic fine that could be unreliable. Red light cameras were introduced in Ontario in 1998, which automatically issue fines to the vehicle owner, and automatic speed enforcement is being rolled out now.

I guess the difference is that it improves road safety, which library fines don't, and that you can contest the ticket with a human in traffic court.

>> I guess the difference is that it improves road safety

Exactly - just like when I want to change the way my kids are acting:

I pick a random occurrence of a specific behaviour, punish them well after the fact and they inevitably draw the correct cause => effect linkage and never repeat the targeted behaviour again.

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While drivers are in many respects indistinguishable from children, they are in fact adults, and can typically figure things out from the explanation that accompanies the punishment.

>I guess the difference is that it improves road safety

I don't think this is necessarily true for red light cameras. Many studies have shown that they lead to more fatalities and more collisions (fewer people getting T-boned when they run red lights, offset by more people getting rear ended when they slam on the brakes so they don't get a ticket). Other studies have also found that cameras reduce collisions and deaths, so I think to some extent it's still an open question and the answer may vary in different locations.

25 years later, automated parking tickets via number plate recognition vans are here:

> One of the more amusing reasons for Smart Parking’s loss was flagged in its interim numbers in February when the company told investors its cash cow of issuing parking fines was being bled by “increased driver compliance resulting in fewer PBNs [parking breach notifications] being issued”.

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/automated-and-iot-parking-fin...

> automatic speed enforcement is being rolled out now

It was already rolled out in the 90s, then removed by a different government in the 2000s. It was called "Photo-radar".

> Photo radar was introduced to the province’s major highways in the early 1990s by Bob Rae’s NDP government, but the controversial project was scrapped by Mike Harris’ Progressive Conservatives.

https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/photo-radar-makes-com...

And it ran on film

> I guess the difference is that it improves road safety,

This is false; the road cameras don't actually improve the road safety — they highly increase rear-end collisions. They're mostly there for revenue, and some jurisdictions don't make them legal; e.g., in California, tickets issued by speed-traffic cameras will be dismissed by any judge.

>This is false; the road cameras don't actually improve the road safety — they highly increase rear-end collisions.

Driving dangerously and then slamming on the brakes to avoid getting caught by the camera increases rear-end collisions. If you drive sensibly to begin with it isn't an issue. If you are driving sensibly then it's the other drivers fault for not allowing enough stopping distance. In neither case are the cameras at fault.

I am so sick of this pity seeking everyone's-at-fault-but-me attitude. If you are driving the vehicle then you are solely responsible for obeying the road rules.

I think it's pretty well established at this point that at least some of the cities that have installed red light cameras have also shortened yellow lights, leading to exactly the behavior described by the GP and the increase in rear-end collisions.

Citations:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/investigations/ct-yellow-ligh...

I have no reason to consider the Tribune a biased source.

https://nypost.com/2012/10/08/citys-gotcha-traffic-cameras-u...

AFAIK, the NY Post doesn't exactly have the reputation of the Times, but I don't have any reason to consider it biased in this matter either.

https://www.motorists.org/blog/6-cities-that-were-caught-sho...

I would tend to assume that "The National Motorists Association" has some pro-car and anti-enforcement bias. Nonetheless, the links are to a third-party site that links directly to local news sources. Feel free to evaluate them as you see fit.

I find it hard to imagine that there's a traffic-engineering reason to shorten yellow lights at intersections with red light cameras, and find the GP's claim that [in many cases] they're an instance of policing for revenue to be credible.

> if you do not pick up the book in three days, you are fined $2.00

Why would a library fine you for not borrowing a book? That is the opposite of how libraries work!

Because you can go online and place holds on many books and the library will ship them to your prefered branch once available and then shelve them for pick-up. There's a significant amount of effort and cost, plus most holds are for the same limited supply of popular books; while your hold is sitting there counteless others are waiting.

The fine is to discourage making hold requests and then never claiming them.

Maybe it got canned because the pickup dates are not predictable. If I place hold on a book with e.g. two holds on it already by somebody else, the book will be ready in 2 month if each person keeps the book for 1 month. If each person returns it on the spot its basically 2 days. Good luck planning your holidays ard that.

For years my public library charged a $3 fee to get a book sent from another library in the system.

At some point I was chatting with a librarian about this and she revealed they had eliminated the fee so as not to discourage the use of interlibrary loans.

I few weeks later I tried checking out something from another library and was then treated to a 10 minute lecture on how it costs them $20 to process these loans and am I really sure I want it.

No thanks. I'll just get it for a penny plus $3.99 shipping from amazon, less than the cost of gasoline to drive into town to order it, pick it up, and return it (3 round trips).

That's really a shame. My library will transfer any book, DVD, computer game, power tool, or even a wifi hotspot from another library for free and usually within two days.

As recently as this past fall I requested books from libraries in New Mexico and New York and both came with zero fees.

I sure hope your local library system has dropped their fees by now.

>No thanks. I'll just get it for a penny plus $3.99 shipping from amazon

There are books for a penny on Amazon?

Quite a lot of them. The publishers are quite upset at the price collapse of used books as people go grab those up.

More like things have become so efficient, so that people donating their used books can have them go to a warehouse and get binned as having value and end up on the marketplace because there's $1+ worth of value after shipping.

The shipping charge covers whatever meager profit they get.

Something like the profitability of collecting cans for the deposit.

Plus any return doesn't refund the shipping charge.

> No thanks. I'll just get it for a penny plus $3.99 shipping from amazon, less than the cost of gasoline to drive into town to order it, pick it up, and return it (3 round trips).

Says Mr. Fancy-pants here with a mailbox/street-accessible doorstep that packages can fit in/on.

Us apartment-dwellers often end up with a notice that says that FedEx or whichever last-mile carrier couldn't in good conscience leave your box in the apartment lobby (and, implicitly, couldn't be arsed to come up the elevator and put the box in front of your apartment door) so instead they have driven your package back to the nearest FedEx warehouse half-way across town, where you're welcome to [pay for the gas required to] come get it. After, of course, waiting 30 minutes behind several people each taking 10 minutes to send packages, before you can spend 30 seconds receiving yours.

Oh, and although you could have intercepted the delivery-man like a linebacker to receive your package today, because you didn't, it won't be available at the warehouse until tomorrow afternoon. Or maybe four days from now. And that's if they don't put it back on a truck to attempt to deliver it again, and again, and again (and give you no way to specify in the delivery instructions that they should just stop trying.)

And after they do finally give up putting it on the truck, they'll make sure to only wait a few days before they send it back to whoever sent it to you, making the sender eat a huge shipping cost that'll make them unlikely to ever send you anything again.

For me, receiving an Amazon delivery both costs more, and takes more time, than buying the same thing in a brick-and-mortar retail store, let alone going to the library!

This may be an obnoxious comment, but if you haven't considered Amazon Locker, you should see if there's one near you. I can say from experience that there are a lot of them around even modestly sized cities and they can make this a lot easier.

There are indeed a few Amazon Lockers around my city, but none less than a 15 minute drive away. The closest thing Amazon would consider treating as a locker (i.e. have Amazon Logistics fulfill to) is my own local post office, which 1. is so understaffed that it takes just as long to pick up a package from it as from the FedEx across town, and 2. for some reason triggers "this item has special handling restrictions and cannot be delivered to your location" messages on 90% of Amazon's catalog.

Also, with a Locker, you still have to get the thing home. Often I'm ordering things delivered because they're too big+heavy+awkward to lug home from a store myself (I don't own a car!), so the Locker doesn't really help in those cases. In many of those cases, the thing won't even fit in a Locker.

That's awful. I would move.

I suspect that the $20 price tag is “per carload” (or vanload, etc.). In other words, it’s only expensive per-book because it isn’t used much. I currently live in South Carolina, and I can use the local library’s website to request an inter-library transfer from several other library systems in the state. I know they wouldn’t make it that easy if they were paying $20 per transfer. On the other hand, your library is probably paying $20/transfer because they do everything they can to make transfers rare.

Every library I've been to has told me the return date when I checked out the book and stamped on the library card or receipt you get when checking out the book. For decades there was no phone call/ notification, you'd get a letter in the mail after you'd already started racking up late fees.

Regardless of how broken their notification system is, keeping track of the return date has always been the borrower's responsibility.

This is about the notification that a book is ready for pickup.

yes - Calgary used to fine you $2 if you did not pick up a hold within 7 days, now it just expires. I wonder if it was the same specific motivation or the PITA of collecting fines in general.

I worked for the Calgary Public Library when we eliminated it. Partly the PITA for the patron but more importantly was we wanted people to borrow more and not be limited. If you were going to Peru and we had 7 books that looked interesting to you, you could order them in and decide at pickup if you wanted them all. If 6 them were crappy oh well - that was difficult when we charged $2 a hold, you wouldn’t risk ordering 7 books to your library. The point of the library is to facilitate your access to the bed information in the form that is best for you. The borrowing limit remains 99 items per person.

Nice. The SF public library also eliminated overdue fines recently [1] - I found that it made going to the library a little less stressful, knowing that if I missed the return deadline by a day or two I wouldn't be fined.

[1] https://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2001163901

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