Motorist fined after CCTV confuses his number plate with woman’s T-shirt
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
After all, it would have been trivial to require that a real person review the footage, but no, that would actually cost money.
It's the same reason it's nearly impossible to get in touch with a human at Google when something goes wrong with your account. We're trying to pretend AI/ML systems will make better decisions, and faster, but they always fail catastrophically at the edge cases in ways humans never do.
The pretense is that AI can handle the bulk, routine cases. Not keeping enough people to handle the edge cases is the real mistake.
Unfortunately, determining whether something is a routine case, is often not a routine case.
In this particular case, we should also pass it through another ML system that answers "are there any vehicles in this photo?", perhaps with a number plate in view (but without trying to read it).
Fortunately after hours of phone calls and weeks of waiting my record was cleared. I never got an answer as to how I became entangled, but losing your license is no joke. I was quite fortunate that everyone involved agreed it was a mixup; no lawyers in that county would take the case because they all had close connections to the prosecutor’s office.
I had a valid permit for the space, so I was good to go. When I went to court, the person had actually taken photos of the other vehicle (with a completely different license plate).
Thing is - in both systems there are costly errors - human and technical. You have to look at the total cost of the system to figure out the net benefit to society.
Serious question: what would it take to make it illegal to send false tickets?
I am not a lawyer, but I think falsely accusing someone of a crime can be a crime if it's "known to be false"
In this case it wasn't "known" to be false because there was no human checking things.. but the fact they (who?) sent the ticket means they assumed it was true.
I'm not sure what the perfect system looks like, but the current system in the US seems broken. Not only is traffic enforcement a huge time waste for police, but traffic stops create an unnecessary hazard while failing to discourage dangerous driving.
As far as traffic stops creating needless hazards, the solution there is simple - change the expectation for motorists to only pull over where there is enough room (so not just in the breakdown lane), and prohibit officers from carrying weapons on traffic stops. If a motorist escalates to violence, the correct answer is to retreat and form a new plan that reflects the changed circumstance and higher severity of crime, not to jump into playing Rambo.
Cameras also have a serious due process problem in that if you get a notification even one week later, you're unable to collect evidence to defend yourself. If it's a daily commute, you might not even remember the weather conditions.
In this particular case it is a "bus" only lane over the river, the diversion for non buses is less than a mile, and far less for almost any actual car journey (given that if you just wanted to cross the bridge you'd walk.
The far more problematic issue in Bath is the continued closure of Cleveland Place due to the bridge falling to bits.
So they have a new wrinkle: put the automated photography kit in someone's car, and pay them to sit and observe the machinery operate. Somehow this is supposed to serve as the same basis of authority as a publicly sworn peace officer who will be obligated to appear in court.
I get that little towns have budget problems and Bubba's brother needs another bass boat, but setting the example of making up and attempting to enforce your own laws like this is a bigger can of worms than they wanted to open.
Many companies that run these systems will drop the fine because it is less costly then fighting it in court as most people just comply, and they do not want to run the risk of some judge ruling the entire system unconstitutional (which IMO it is)
I get that having some private company collect fines directly would be bad, but couldn't they solve that with a simple manual review process by law enforcement?
They are not operated by the police dept, nor does anyone in law enforcement review them.
Also, the systems in place for toll road entrances seem to be doing a good enough job. Why can't the same thing be implemented for traffic cameras?
I am not sure what you are talking about when it comes to implied consent, but in the US At least one is only responsible for their own actions, it is a dangerous precedent to set that a 3rd party should be liable for the actions of others, were by the state can just fine or even arrest someone with out proving them personally committed the offense
No that is not something I want to have applied to anything not even tolls or traffic laws
You can fight the fine if it wasn't you in the car and if the picture they took of you is unclear or looks like someone else you can get out of it.
Assuming you're recognizable in the picture what's the issue with that?
You could be paid to have the speed radar placed inside your car at all time while on the road. If someone overtakes you at a given speed, it calculates that car's speed based on your own speed and knows the local speed limit based on GPS. The Good Citizen™ gets a salary proportional to how many tickets he helped deliver.
Thankfully, we're living in modern times, and while autonomous driving is not there yet, we can use similar technology to prevent traffic violations. When you are on a public road with a speed limit, your car will simply not accelerate beyond the speed limit. When you are missing a red light, the car will not let you run it.
Of course, there are emergencies where you need to do these things: your pregnant wife is giving birth, you are Jack Bauer and preventing nuclear war. Activating the hazards disables the traffic assist. It also keeps a log of all violations and forwards it to the authorities, but since it's a medical or national security issue, nothing will come of it.
This cannot be done overnight, which is why there will be a generous period while the old system is phased out and the new system is debugged.
Nitpicking: This is very common in movies, but it's not how real life work. The first delivery takes a long time, probably two days with random isolated contractions that make sleeping very difficult. And after the 10 minutes interval between contractions, there is still plenty of time. Ask your medical doctors for recommendations and good time estimations. You don't want to have an unnecessary accident that day.
Third and fourth delivery may be faster. Don't get too complacent because the first one took so much. Also, ask your doctor about this.
PS: If you want to read another rant, I can write one about the "first word of the baby".
Obviously, a nitpicking PSA is nevertheless appreciated.
Of course, when it comes to human biology, YMMV...a LOT. When my brother-in-law was born, his mom had her first contraction, and he came out 45 minutes later. Her friends envy how damn quick her labor was.
It's too bad we do not live in that word, and such technology would be used as a wedge to track your vehicle in whole.
Our cellphones once did not track us either.
We have as a society decided we don't want people to drive faster than a sensibly derived speed, we already license cars to be road legal or not, and exact positioning is already utterly ubiquitous, put those things together and you have pretty much solved the problem of speeding. The only major issue is GPS accuracy -- e.g. what if on the highway your car thinks it's on a parallel slow-moving road. But you don't need perfect accuracy, you only need a reasonably accurate measure of inaccuracy and a fallback to the higher limit (or no limit).
The other major issue (and the reason why this won't happen anytime soon) is current car drivers being uncomfortable with their own property limiting their capability to drive beyond the speed limit, which most of them do as a matter of course, to which I say, tough luck, you're free to drive a non-limited car on private ground.
Note that none of this involves any central tracking of cars, in fact it's less invasive than the current system of monitoring using radar and cameras.