If you prevent government from launching technologies for every software bug / mistake, you will get a bloated government which will do everything manually increasing it's cost to taxpayers and decrease in quality of services.
The key is still to launch fast and iterate over bugs especially in the realm of traffic / parking violations which at the most causes annoyances to people ( I mean the same people are willing to sit in front of Holland Tunnel for an hour )
Seems like the premise you’re going with here is a false dichotomy.
There’s no reason this project had to issue parking violations from launch - it could issue soft warnings and get the same feedback from impacted civilians to fix the issues before causing them undue distress.
> The cameras also failed to realize that both the M79 and Bx35 bus routes were still in the “warning” phase of a new enforcement pattern – which means even legitimate infractions should not have resulted in monetary penalties.
> Would you support bounties for ordinary people to enforce parking?
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.)
Do you park in NYC? I don't think a single photograph is going to convey sufficient information to make it clear that someone is violating parking rules, many of which are temporal.
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?
> don't think a single photograph is going to convey sufficient information to make it clear that someone is violating parking rules, many of which are temporal
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.
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.
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.
Nobody is going kill someone for reporting idling trucks. The drivers of these trucks don't care; the company tells them to idle and swallows the fine (typically bartered down in bulk).
If you go around doing it you'll make a name for yourself. Couriers, ubers, delivery drivers, they all have social media. Eventually you'll run across the guy who "wrong pedals" you.
Sure, I suppose it could happen in that case. There's no public evidence of any such occurrence, however; most of the city's truck traffic is big companies, and I don't see why any driver would risk prison time to stave off an idling ticket that Amazon, etc. is just going to negotiate down in court anyways.
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.
I've lived here my whole life, and I know a fair number of people who drive trucks (and cabs, and do food delivery) for a living. Again: it's possible, but I have never heard of anybody even getting a beatdown over this, much less getting killed.
> 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.
> 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 value to the _majority_ of tax payers.
By how much? 1%, 5%... or? It's measured so what's the measurement?
> and parking in them is in fact illegal
And all you have to prove this is a snapshot. Which are not accurate and is the basis for the entire thread here. And people who didn't commit any crime have been charged. So there is clearly an open question as to how many of these pictures appear to be illegal versus how many actually are.
> so why the air quotes?
Those are actual quotes and you've projected your assumptions into my actions. Did it harm your ability to understand what I wrote? If not then why make an issue of it?
The key is still to launch fast and iterate over bugs especially in the realm of traffic / parking violations which at the most causes annoyances to people ( I mean the same people are willing to sit in front of Holland Tunnel for an hour )