Maybe government tries to do too much.
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 bounties.)
I think it would also be weird to penalize people for reports that were ultimately un-actionable. Can you point to any government function that has a similar mechanism?
Why does it need to be a single photo?
> weird to penalize people for reports that were ultimately un-actionable
To the extent I suggested penalties, it's only in reducing bounties payable. That's less a penalty than recognition of costs.
Seems like the obvious solution is: multiple photos!
> Can you point to any government function that has a similar mechanism?
https://www.motortrend.com/news/nyc-idling-fine-citizen-repo...
Because that kind of thing leads to a lower-trust society, especially when plausibly motivated by personal financial gain
[1] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/nyc-anti-idling-la...
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.
I wouldn't risk it.
(The city has other, unincentivized, idling laws for other classes of vehicles.)
I was imprecise to lump them all together like that.
Pretty much everyone who depends on small business in NYC hates the government and law enforcement of NYC and sees them as revenuers (Louis Rossman covers this in detail on his youtube channel, to mention someone who's respected here on HN). The idea that someone would help them for a cut is incredibly disgusting to most people who live in this world.
It's incredibly foreseeable that some guy in the cab of a box truck who's distracted with his dispatch iPad looks up to see some guy taking pictures, puts two and two together and puts the truck in drive. They don't hire middle class techies to drive these trucks. Your morals don't translate to onto some 20yo guy from Newark. And they also don't translate into his hotheaded 16yo helper who runs with a less than law abiding crowd and you didn't see come out of the building just behind.
Like I said, the risk ain't worth my life.
> Like I said, the risk ain't worth my life.
Then don't take it! But I don't think the evidence supports treating the average truck driver as a psycho who's one idling ticket away from vehicular manslaughter.
Edit: as a case in point: Kuntzman[1] has been going around the city fixing car - including plenty of cop car - license plates for years. I think the worst he's gotten is verbal abuse, and he's doing something much more overt and aggressive.
[1]: https://www.curbed.com/2023/12/congestion-pricing-gersh-kunt...
You can always vote with your wallet and not use that corporation's roads