AI-powered cameras installed on Metro buses to ticket illegally parked cars
latimes.com
latimes.com
These technologies are probabilistic with some nonzero chances of error which can't always be easily detected. These are implemented by people with some knowledge of the tech used (and hopefully the understanding of error), but are to be used by people who expect the output to be 100% true. I do not know how they would deal with tech errors which do not look like errors, but feel like there should be more cognizance about this and expectations should be set accordingly. Same goes for any facial recognition tech deployed by authorities.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
This is possible but we have decades of camera enforcement experience suggesting that courts are aware that these systems are not as reliable as the manufacturers claim. People have been challenging photo tickets since the previous century and there’s a well-established process for challenging them.
A typical example would be breath analysers. If humans were to judge who is drunk, there is a high error rate. With tech, the error rate is low, but if there is a bug in one of the equipments, many wrong and unnecessary arrests might be made.
I find this an interesting comment with your choice of examples as there is an extensive legal history about false positives (medical conditions, mouthwash, etc.) and the need to show maintenance and calibration records.
I was on a jury back in the 2000s where the San Diego police had to have someone from the crime lab testify about their process for managing their breathalyzers, and we ended up unanimously finding the guy not guilty on that charge because they’d messed up the process and had been a year late on calibration testing despite everyone agreeing he was drunk (based on his own testimony, receipts, and the bar staff, he’d had 3 double vodkas in the hour before getting behind the wheel, so we found him guilty on the other prong of California’s DUI statute - which is exactly what his attorney told us afterwards had been his prediction).
I would rather that these things happen preemptively so that there are no such challenges to fight or tickets to contest just because an AI flagged something and humans went ahead with it. I mean that other tech is deterministic, while AI is probabilistic, but people still havent updated their models for such tech. And we need to keep those examples in mind.
For most of the cases, won’t need a human in the loop.
I wonder if there's a phrase for that.
It doesn't especially matter where the burden of proof lies if the process for contesting requires any substantial amount of effort on the part of the victim of the false positive.
In other words, the burden of proof is still on the government to provide sufficient evidence. If they won’t or can’t, there is no case.
That should be codified into law because the state is doubly incentivized to do nothing about false positives. If you pay it, they get free money. If you don’t, they get free labor.
The only thing you can argue is that it shouldnt require a court case to dispute unless it fails a human review.
But what we should expect (and demand) is that the process have no higher an error rate than human reporting, and that the errors should be no harder to correct/appeal.
I would actually ask that the errors be easier to correct, not just no harder.
Even if the error rate is lower, automated systems will detect a larger number of errors and therefore are likely to create a larger number of false positives. If we're going to automate the creation of false positives we need to equivalently automate their correction.
There should be a phone number, a QR code, and a printed link on the ticket that all provide a one-step process to contest a ticket. As soon as a ticket is contested it should be put on hold with no payment due until a follow-up ticket is issued by a human.
If we don't do this then we've just automated the creation of false positives without giving the victims of those false positives any equivalent advantage.
Imagine if the system was flawed and assigned all tickets with an unrecognized license plate to NULL or 000000. THe owner of that specific plate would have to spend their entire life contesting tickets.
A less extreme case of this would be a badly-trained model that always detects certain kinds of cars as occupying bus lanes, even if they're parked legally. If you're in the tiny minority that has one of those, you can't park anywhere without getting a ticket which you must contest.
If those cars end up statistically more likely to be owned by the poor / black / homeless, now the local government has a scandal on their hands.
Certainly a lot better than the big tech "we banned you but won't tell you why or allow you to talk to a human about it".
My only problem with more camera-based law enforcement for traffic violations is the fact that they can't tell who was driving. SO the fine goes to the registered owner of the vehicle, so folks won't want to lend vehicles. Of course, one argument is that you shouldn't loan your vehicle to some one who is going to be breaking the law... but is that really the world we want to live in, where we can't loan anything to anyone for fear of them misusing it and the owner being held responsible? I don't have a good answer there.
If you are talking about a car, then yes, that's the world I want to live in. Would they even be insured anyway?
To be clear, insurance for US vehicles typically only covers a specific named vehicle, although most policies have a few carve outs for specific purposes (eg, 30 days of grace period when you buy a car before adding it to a policy, as well as applying to any car you rent). If the owner of the vehicle doesn’t have insurance and you borrow it, then there presumably wouldn’t be any insurance coverage at all.
I suspect there's a similar issue with F&F. The cost of insurance is based on you personally, and if they allow NDs, or friends to drive, it's an unknown risk as they can't really tell how much you will actually use the car.
Also, I don't know how much insurance differs between US and EU. IMHO, Irish car insurance is expensive. perhaps due to lenient courts?
Only if it is that easy to contest it.
You just declare who was driving when you receive the fine, if it's not you. It already works this way in many countries.
And in Western countries with weak privacy laws, this class of technology also raises the specter of private "social credit" behavioral tracking to discriminates against and quantize people by grading their online and offline behaviors in totally opaque manners.
Technology can help with consistent enforcement. Stop light cameras, in my experience, are more impartial and objective than police officers.
Where I live in the U.S., crime is prevalent. Many laws are flouted by criminals and rarely enforced by the police or district attorneys. The system has become a farce. It's better to enforce the laws consistently, or if they're not needed, to eliminate them.
But I'm not suggesting that every law is good. If a law is not enforceable or not a net positive for the community, change it or get rid of it. But don't enforce it inconsistently, and don't apply it to certain people and not others depending on the whims of the police and the district attorneys and their personal predilections and politics.
The police should crack down hard on: license plate covers, fake license plates, fake temporary plates, etc. I suggest seizing the vehicles as contraband. Then I might support more automated enforcement. Until then, I don’t.
Cameras actively help that process, too, because they collect data showing how widespread the problem is and individual fake plates will collect tickets showing how dangerous those particular drivers are.
If someone miscalculates and ends up blocking the box, they'll get honked at, but they still get to their destination faster.
If they hit someone who had a green or walk signal, I don't know what happens to them, but it doesn't seem to be enough of a deterrent.
I'd love any evidence of that and I'd wager that that statement is wrong. Blocking the box only accomplishes slowing down the cross traffic with no benefit to the person doing the blocking.
If the exit moves shortly after you blocked, you may have saved the time between when you got to move and when the light you should have stopped for turns green. If it's a long cycle, this could be meaningful, although it may depend on bottlenecks elsewhere in your path.
If the exit remains blocked until after your light cycles, you still saved the time it takes to cross over half the intersection. This probably isn't meaningful.
Of course, if your blocking of boxes actually blocks a traffic move that would unblock your exit, that's not good. And if blocking becomes common, it causes confusion and delay for everyone.
You can’t (currently) ticket people for crimes like speeding, but you can use it to ticket for other non-criminal violations like other parking violations, i.e., replacing meter maids.
People should not be allowed to drive unsupervised. I am anti surveillance and anti cop. There is no safe world with unsupervised driving. And so we as a society traded some of our rights, acknowledging this new dangerous tool but choosing its convenience even though this led to whole new police departments, policies, etc.
Pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, and even drivers know that the way people drive is a serious problem.
I don’t want the cameras either, but to get rid of those you have to get rid of cars.
all cops are good
all cars are good
i apologize
Because they want to punish those who dare to use firefox without changing the user agent?
For sensitive material, we would often insta-ban anyone who hit us with a 'curl' user-agent and that definitely killed a lot of script-kiddies' dreams right then and there.
Obviously, if you are a determined "hacker" you would get past that and hit the honeypots but simple filters could filter out enough scrapers such that the rest of the attacks could be manually evaluated by humans.
Just 5 cameras driving about the city all day ought to catch enough violators that anyone habitually parked in a bus lane will be caught and will stop doing it.
I could understand 1 camera per route maybe if the busses physically always stay on the same route.
In most areas, local residents allowed for and voted for controlled parking zones primarily to prevent commuters or tourists parking all day/week and to reduce things like car storage by dealerships. Basically, to ensure that parking was actually available for residents, to make the best of a scarce resource.
I don't believe that the intent was ever to penalise someone parking for 15-30 minutes to have a coffee or to shop, to drop off parcels, to make tradesmen have to pay to park when working, etc. Perfect enforcement is punitive, and reduces the utility of the road network overall.
My personal opinion is that these surveillance schemes are radicalising a lot of people and turning them against their elected officials. Discretion fosters trust in power.
Seems like a good deal for the city if they fine someone at least twice a day per device.
How much would you pay to clear parked cars from bus stops and bus lanes? That's going to improve route times... Although how much of a difference it makes, and how much of a difference is worth $11M, I don't know.
I’m seeing too many comments jumping to conclusions before reading this paragraph. A human will check the footage and make a final call
If you think about, AI are just linear regressions on steroids. So we could start selling graphing calculators as having AI even.
While this is true, the big optical character recognition breakthrough was Yann LeCun's use of Convolutional Neural Networks in the 1990s, which I think most people put in the definitions for "ML" and "AI." But of course, as John McCarthy said: "as soon as it works, no one calls it ai anymore"
In any case, neither the camera company nor the bus company have any authority to issue tickets, all they can do is submit complaints+evidence to the appropriate institution.
If a car is blocking a bus stop, the harm is done even if the car leaves before some official arrives to write a ticket, and it seems reasonable that the bus operator should be able to request that the law gets enforced without having to stay on the spot and point out the violation to someone - we do want a deterrent effect towards any would-be violators, that they should fear a ticket even if there are no officials onsite, and perhaps not do the prohibited thing.
If we want people to obey a certain restriction (especially a relatively minor one like parking in bus lanes), any obstacles that make enforcement time-consuming or inconvenient tend to result in it not being enforced and not being followed - and if we're okay with that, then we should instead totally repeal that restriction and any fines, as if it will be enforced only sporadically, then it will be turned into a tool for arbitrary punishment and not for actually getting that law followed - if we want the latter, we do want mass enforcement.
I suspect this is meant as a cheap way to keep traffic police from having to interact with potentially violent drivers who believe they should be free to violate parking laws.
Consider https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/sfmta-parking-offi...
> SAN FRANCISCO – Parking control officers rallied outside San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency headquarters Thursday, fearing for their safety as the city ramps up its crackdown on parking violations.
> Officers told CBS News Bay Area that they've always felt at risk while doing their jobs. Now that SFMTA has announced that they'll be cracking down on parking enforcement, officers like Mishan Schexnayder feel like there's a bigger target on their back.
> ... "We deal with everything, from objects being thrown at us all the way up to physical assaults and threats being made on our lives and our family," Adams said.
The choice is either to have a full duty police officer doing traffic enforcement, with the training and arrest powers when things go violent, or hide behind a camera and magic AI dust.
Long history suggests that those with political power don't really care about traffic enforcement, likely in part because those with political power also drive and want weak enforcement to apply to them. Enforcement only along bus routes, gives them the ability to tell bus riders that politicians are Doing Something, while minimizing the negative political consequences of mass enforcement against entitled car drivers. (Hence why the enforcement will only be for car "parked illegally in a bus lane or a bus stop".)
Personally I agree with the need for mass enforcement of traffic laws, including speeding. But I also recognize how driving is given such elevated standing in US culture that I'm not holding my breath. I also see no chance of repealing those laws, or amending them to reflect current use.
Consider how many people break the speed limit, and if the speed limit is raised to reflect current speeds, they'll go even faster, because the cultural expectation is that driving 5mph over the limit is somehow acceptable.
What's good for one is good for all.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/speed-cameras-comin...
That assumes that the "law" in general is fair and not favouring the current hegemonic societal consensus, which is definitely not the case. What people fail to see, or fail to want to see, is that the hoi polloi, the "poors", the "plebs", in many cases had to resort to actually breaking the law here and there in order to make their world a little bit more equal. These types of laws and the way that they are now applied will actively prohibit that in the future, in effect making this a less fair/less equal world (yes, I'm saying that in many instances actually breaking the existing law makes the world fairer for a big chunk of the population).
I'm saying that more probably there was a bigger percentage of Tesla owners paying their parking tickets compared to clunker owners doing the same, so that this law (written and most especially applied in the spirit of the world inhabited by those Tesla owners) will in effect disproportionately affect the "poors"/"plebs" a lot more.
The system this builds though on a multi-decade scale is total insanity.
I don't see how it is possible that there is anything resembling what we would call a free and open society in 50 years.
You should note that the Ingsoc party opposition to private car ownership also applies to top-hats (part of the "uniform of the capitalists"):
> Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the Forties and the Thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor cars ...
So going on that interpretation, you can tell we live in a dystopia because almost no one wears top-hats now.
Presumption of guilt by default, requiring you to pay the fine before you’re allowed to contest the alleged infraction.
Absolute rules usually means less natural justice, there are times when pursuing minor violations are not in the public interest.
Where I live, every ticket arrives with a link to view the video. This has lead to really telling moments where people have ranted about the “trap” and some even share the videos, which reliably show them rolling through stop signs or red lights.
Also the fact that you’re only allowed to contest an allegation within an arbitrary amount of time hardly seems in concordance with natural justice.
> Also the fact that you’re only allowed to contest an allegation within an arbitrary amount of time hardly seems in concordance with natural justice.
Why? It’s common in many areas to say that you have a certain amount of time to appeal an error to avoid needing to keep records for minor issues for long periods of time. This was even more common in the past where you would have been relying on human memory more and some people would try to game the system by waiting & hoping that an officer wouldn’t be available or would have forgotten enough details. It’s hardly just to allow lawbreakers to get off by exploiting the error correction mechanism, either.