[HN Gopher] AI-powered cameras installed on Metro buses to ticke...
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AI-powered cameras installed on Metro buses to ticket illegally
parked cars
Author : hentrep
Score : 80 points
Date : 2024-04-25 18:36 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.latimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.latimes.com)
| rokkitmensch wrote:
| What about programmatic speed ticketing? Either we care to
| enforce these laws impartially or we want to use them to give
| cops the ability to exercise their discretion, tertium non datur.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| What about posting all police body camera videos at the end of
| the day and offering 50% of the fine collected from the cop to
| anyone who can spot a violation of policy or of law?
|
| What's good for one is good for all.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Latin phrase to support an argument for pure law and order --
| parody gold
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| There is a pilot program that took effect January 1 but the
| cameras aren't expected to be on until this summer or later
|
| https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/speed-cameras-comin...
| starfleet_bop wrote:
| There's nothing inherently dangerous about driving fast if it's
| in accordance with driving to the conditions on the road.
| Driving too slowly is more likely to cause an accident by
| impeding the flow of traffic.
| s09dfhks wrote:
| What are the chances the video feed is just being sent to India
| like Amazon's "just walk out" technology
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Likely. But if the company providing the service is caught in
| an audit not implementing the data retention policies that are
| in the contract, they are dead on the spot.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| That's the future CEO's problem.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| IANAL but I believe the CEO is liable even if/after they
| left the company.
| jvm___ wrote:
| API - Actually People in India
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Not even India, it's just piped into all our capchas
| nvch wrote:
| "Select all images with illegally parked cars" starts to feel
| quite possible
| znpy wrote:
| that would actually be cool, and an useful use of captchas,
| for once.
| john2x wrote:
| Practically fool proof. A net positive for society.
| andy99 wrote:
| Captchas, at least recaptcha which is the main image
| selection one, exist to enforce Google's browser monopoly
| and force tracking on you. You're not proving you're a
| human, you're being punished for not behaving how google
| wants. It's vile.
| basilgohar wrote:
| This is a little known fact and proper characterization
| of reCaptcha that I wish I could draw even more attention
| to.
| nulld3v wrote:
| I dunno, I frequently do recaptchas on Firefox on Linux
| and it hasn't been a problem for me? It does feel like
| they make me do the image selection more often, but I've
| never had any problems completing the captchas and it
| doesn't happen often enough to bother me.
| LtWorf wrote:
| You like wasting time working for free for google?
| nulld3v wrote:
| Well no, but I also understand why captchas are kinda
| necessary.
| cute_boi wrote:
| I think it is unethical to make people free work in such
| case. Captcha is there to prove if the user is human or
| not.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Strange to see a community like HN not understanding data
| annotation as a model training task
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| Drawing bounding boxes around license plates, and then running
| OCR on those license plates, is a relatively solved problem. My
| guess is that low confidence predictions will probably still be
| manually reviewed.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Why is this AI? License plate scanning technology has been around
| for decades. Toll booths use them everywhere.
| delfinom wrote:
| AI is the new marketing buzzword. Got to label everything as
| AI.
|
| If you think about, AI are just linear regressions on steroids.
| So we could start selling graphing calculators as having AI
| even.
| lukevp wrote:
| And what are movies except for coordinated, flashing lights
| and a paper cone being shaken real fast?
| allpaca wrote:
| Because it's trendy, obviously.
| VS1999 wrote:
| Who knows, although the main idea is that there are now cameras
| on the busses recording 24/7 looking for violations and
| emailing them to the local police department.
| PeterisP wrote:
| For starters, you need to determine which cars are actually
| parked, and if that spot is violating the rules. For fixed
| cameras generally the installation process just marks as spot
| or lane where every car "counts", but a camera on a moving bus
| needs to do that on its own.
| pompino wrote:
| couldn't that be done off-line? The active system would just
| collect the data, plate number, GPS, etc., and the off-line
| system would process it with a overlay of the city map, etc.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Quoting the official claims from the article, "Only when
| the system observes a vehicle parked illegally in a bus
| lane or a bus stop does it record the license plate and
| capture video of the event." - it seems very reasonable
| from both practical and privacy standpoint that all that
| data should not be collected unless there's some reason to
| believe (e.g. by such an "AI" system) that there likely is
| an actual violation.
| _joel wrote:
| Scanning a licence plate is one thing, working out if a car is
| parked illegally is another, right?
| bkor wrote:
| That's being done in Rotterdam for ages. Cars with cameras on
| top which determine which cars have a parking violation. I
| think they check illegally parked cars plus cars which didn't
| pay. It's anything but new technology.
| swores wrote:
| "AI" is not a synonym for "cutting edge less than a year
| old technology", the fact that this sort of AI has existed
| for years doesn't change the fact that it is a form of AI
| nor the fact that this specific city had decided to start
| to use it now.
| sigmar wrote:
| >License plate scanning technology has been around for decades.
|
| 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"
| paganel wrote:
| Dystopic world we're living in, and many of us here on this very
| forum have helped built it.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| My favorite part of 1984 was about the well-maintained public
| transit infrastructure of Oceania, and how all of the inner
| party members who broke traffic laws received parking tickets.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Indeed, we should charge the parked driver for the cost caused
| by all those passengers in buses held up. They are getting off
| cheap with the ticket.
| Axsuul wrote:
| How is this dystopian? Dystopian would be if we ticket cars
| based on how likely they might park in the bus lane.
| starfleet_bop wrote:
| It violates the right to confront one's accuser / question
| the witness in court.
|
| 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.
| Axsuul wrote:
| "A person who is ticketed would have access to the
| recording, Territo said, and the ability to challenge the
| violation -- a process that can take months."
| acdha wrote:
| You know, rather that making something you could just look
| at the literal decades of legal history here. People have
| been contesting camera tickets since the 20th century and
| the article specifically notes that they retain the video
| footage long enough to cover the adjudication period where
| someone has the right to challenge the ticket and would
| have access to the recording for that purpose.
|
| 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.
| nox101 wrote:
| wish they'd ticket traffic violators, not just parked cars. Cars
| running red lights, cars driving in lanes they aren't supposed to
| be in. Cars turning in places that are illegal to turn at. Cars
| speeding. Cars stopped in crosswalks. I see these daily. I'm
| happy to submit camera footage if it means tickets and
| enforcement.
| neilv wrote:
| Some intersections in the Boston area, there seems to be a de
| facto rule of "3 cars through after it turns red".
|
| 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.
| highcountess wrote:
| Don't worry, that's probably one of the real reasons for 100
| camera systems. As someone else pointed out, you don't need 100
| cameras to act as a policy enforcement and deterrence, but if
| you wanted to get constant surveillance of vehicles and people
| movements, recorded in public, you would want 100+ systems.
|
| 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.
| hackernewds wrote:
| That sounds like an overstepping of surveillance. Remember
| power is just as dangerous when wielded in the wrong hands
| flawsofar wrote:
| cars led to the creation of CHP and the expansion of US
| police authority, then that spread even more afar.
|
| 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.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Some people like this innocent bloke are the real perpetrators
| behind mass surveillance and big brother.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Do they really need 100 cameras?
|
| 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.
| sandspar wrote:
| "The Metro has 114 bus routes in Los Angeles with 11,770 bus
| stops." Numbers vary a bit by source. Los Angeles is a car city
| like Dallas or Houston.
| ankit219 wrote:
| When i read these implementations, one thing I think about is the
| British post office scandal, also known as Horizon IT scandal[1].
|
| 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
| pompino wrote:
| how does it compare versus human error?
| lolinder wrote:
| What the exact error rate is isn't relevant to OP's concern,
| which is that operators of the tooling will treat it as
| having a 0% error rate in a way that they don't with human
| judgment. We've already seen this play out with algorithms
| designed to predict recidivism or what have you--law
| enforcement and judicial officials place undue weight on the
| outputs of algorithms and trust them implicitly where they
| might ask questions of a human expert.
| acdha wrote:
| > which is that operators of the tooling will treat it as
| having a 0% error rate in a way that they don't with human
| judgment
|
| 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.
| antegamisou wrote:
| Techbros always love citing the supposedly devastating human
| fallibility yet experience shows poorly configured/developed
| automated systems are much more of a concern.
| pompino wrote:
| Nice straw-man, but getting back to reality, nobody in this
| thread has put forth the belief that automated systems are
| infallible, or is arguing that point. Also the fact that
| humans are fallible, hasn't stopped us from setting up
| judicial systems based on human judgement - which work
| pretty well in several scenarios.
| rvnx wrote:
| Not a problem, if person contests, double-check the picture.
| Like with a speed camera.
|
| For most of the cases, won't need a human in the loop.
| squigz wrote:
| One might argue that a citizen shouldn't need to prove they
| didn't break a law, but rather the government has to
| (reliably) prove that they did.
|
| I wonder if there's a phrase for that.
| simmerup wrote:
| That's what the picture is for
| hackernewds wrote:
| False positives can be human validated
| eli wrote:
| false positives can also be human generated
| yardie wrote:
| I've contested the red light camera fines in my
| municipality a few times now. In every case I request the
| footage and each time it's been overturned because the
| footage clearly shows me stopping before turning right on
| read. Ive never had to provide proof that is the states
| job.
| lolinder wrote:
| Meanwhile, I've never had to contest a false positive
| because my state doesn't allow red light cameras. That's
| a lot of time that I haven't had to spend defending
| myself against spurious charges.
|
| 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.
| garbagewoman wrote:
| You did have to provide proof! you were assumed guilty
| until you proved yourself innocent by using the evidence
| that the state themselves already had, but didn't present
| as proof of the infringement.
| cgriswald wrote:
| The state should have reviewed the footage and not
| charged you in the first place.
|
| 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.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| In this case, the article clearly states that a human
| will review the footage... not sure what happened in the
| above cases, if there was no review, or if the review was
| simply rushed? I do think it would be fair if the state
| had to pay the same fine back to the person they
| incorrectly fined as compensation for their time.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| These tickets get sent in the mail with proof, the photos.
|
| The only thing you can argue is that it shouldnt require a
| court case to dispute unless it fails a human review.
| LtWorf wrote:
| lol. No they don't.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It depends on the location, my local automated speed
| camera process involves getting a human-approved ticket
| in the mail that includes the photos.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| You might be looking for one of those?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_onus
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(law)
| squigz wrote:
| I was being sarcastic, apologies :) The phrase I was
| referring to is "innocent until proven guilty."
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| None of our processes have a 0% false positive rate. Not
| tickets written by humans, not criminal charges filed by
| humans, not court cases tried in front of a jury. So maybe
| a phrase would be "unrealistic expectations".
|
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| > 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.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Even if we accept automated evidence gathering we don't
| have to accept automating charges based on that evidence.
| lolinder wrote:
| I can get behind this idea if and only if the government
| makes it absolutely trivial to request a human to review the
| ticket, with no additional fee and no attempt to dissuade
| people from exercising that right.
|
| 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.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Better yet, the website could allow you to login an
| instantly view the evidence against you, in addition to
| filing the appeal. Also, if your appeal is found valid
| based on the video evidence, you should get the amount of
| the fine back from the government as a fee for them wasting
| your time.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| They will do this. Later when some place like Booz Allen
| Hamilton picks it up, they will observe that revenue goes
| up when dark patterns and obfuscation goes up. So the
| initial implementation will go away.
| miki123211 wrote:
| This doesn't work if the failures are correlated and very
| often happen to a certain group of people.
|
| 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.
| anon373839 wrote:
| Los Angeles doesn't have a meaningful process to contest
| parking tickets: it's an automatic denial, regardless of
| merit. The only way to get actual review is to go to civil
| court.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Sounds like the civil court is the meaningful contest?
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Which is why a human being has to review the camera footage and
| decide to issue the citation. If the system makes an error, and
| the human checking it makes an error, then the human receiving
| the citation can contest it. Seems a reasonable number of
| safeguards to me.
|
| 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.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > 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
|
| If you are talking about a car, then yes, that's the world I
| want to live in. Would they even be insured anyway?
| cute_boi wrote:
| >human receiving the citation can contest it
|
| Only if it is that easy to contest it.
| schutt wrote:
| Anzeigenhauptmeister just lost his Hobby :(
| nashashmi wrote:
| LA is so late to the game. NYC already does this and they do it
| without AI. Buses have cams. Anyone who drives in bus only lanes
| gets a ticket. Any cars parked in bus stops get tickets and a
| whole lot of honking.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| The big problem with all this automated enforcement is they only
| end up punishing honest people. Kind of like continually raising
| fares while doing zero about fare evasion.
|
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| This is a "do both" situation: those "honest people" are still
| knowingly trying to cheat their neighbors, so while they pose
| less of a threat individually than the people with fake plates
| the aggregate cost is quite high due to greater numbers, and
| fining them is done by a separate group of people so it doesn't
| take any resources away from the police you need to go after
| the hardened criminals.
|
| 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.
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| Let's say that the city of LA theorizes that enforcement of
| parking via these cameras will be cash flow positive; assuming
| the $11M contract size, 100 cameras and 5 years at face value
| you'd expect each device to bring in $60/day to break even.
|
| Seems like a good deal for the city if they fine someone at least
| twice a day per device.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm all for requiring a human to give out tickets of all or any
| kind.
| PeterisP wrote:
| This is exactly what's being proposed - quoting the article,
| "Once a recording is made, it will be submitted to L.A.
| Department of Transportation where a human will assess whether
| a ticket should be issued."
|
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| I'd rather they be onsite, that's what I was thinking.
| iaseiadit wrote:
| I'm of the belief that if a law exists but isn't being enforced,
| the only correct course of action is to eliminate the law or
| start enforcing it. Otherwise, you enforce the law
| inconsistently, and you reinforce the notion that laws don't need
| to be followed.
|
| 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.
| flawsofar wrote:
| look up "broken windows policing"
| iaseiadit wrote:
| I'm familiar. Completely transformed New York City in the
| 1990s for the better.
|
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The idea is to keep unenforced laws on the books, so they can
| be selectively enforced against one's political enemies.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| There are now CCTV vehicles driving around some boroughs of
| London scanning for parked cars. I strongly believe that this
| breaks the spirit of the law as it was originally conceived and
| implemented.
|
| 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.
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