AI-powered cameras installed on Metro buses to ticket illegally parked cars

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-24/ai-powered-cameras-installed-on-metro-buses-will-be-used-to-spot-illegally-parked-cars

by hentrep • 2 years ago

93 145 2 years ago

latimes.com

rokkitmensch2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Latin phrase to support an argument for pure law and order -- parody gold

rokkitmensch2• 2 years ago

I think that you've cottoned on to my sometimes oblique humor!

joshuahaglund• 2 years ago

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_bop3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

What are the chances the video feed is just being sent to India like Amazon’s “just walk out” technology

whiplash4512• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

That’s the future CEO’s problem.

jvm___• 2 years ago

API - Actually People in India

iancmceachern• 2 years ago

Not even India, it's just piped into all our capchas

nvch• 2 years ago

“Select all images with illegally parked cars” starts to feel quite possible

hackernewds3• 2 years ago

Strange to see a community like HN not understanding data annotation as a model training task

chaos_emergent2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Why is this AI? License plate scanning technology has been around for decades. Toll booths use them everywhere.

delfinom• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

And what are movies except for coordinated, flashing lights and a paper cone being shaken real fast?

allpaca• 2 years ago

Because it's trendy, obviously.

VS1999• 2 years ago

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.

PeterisP6• 2 years ago

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.

pompino3• 2 years ago

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.

_joel• 2 years ago

Scanning a licence plate is one thing, working out if a car is parked illegally is another, right?

bkor• 2 years ago

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.

sigmar• 2 years ago

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"

paganel2• 2 years ago

Dystopic world we're living in, and many of us here on this very forum have helped built it.

aaronbrethorst2• 2 years ago

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.

aaronbrethorst2• 2 years ago

I've been thinking about the description of these traffic tickets as "dystopian" more today than I'd like to admit. Something about it has really bothered me and I finally think I know what. I would argue that this is actually _utopian_: fair and equal treatment under the law, whether you are the NYPD Commissioner or the Mayor, Black or white, gay or straight, male or female—if you are parked in an illegal spot, you'll get a ticket in the mail.

eesmith2• 2 years ago

Well, we know Oceania had buses. And no traffic laws ("In Oceania there is no law.")

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.

stefan_• 2 years ago

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.

Axsuul2• 2 years ago

How is this dystopian? Dystopian would be if we ticket cars based on how likely they might park in the bus lane.

starfleet_bop3• 2 years ago

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.

nox1012• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

estebank• 2 years ago

they still get to their destination faster

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.

nox1012• 2 years ago

IIRC NYC make blocking the box a fine and 2 points (so approximately $4k) and apparently enforce it. No idea how effective it's been

highcountess• 2 years ago

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.

hackernewds3• 2 years ago

That sounds like an overstepping of surveillance. Remember power is just as dangerous when wielded in the wrong hands

nashashmi2• 2 years ago

Some people like this innocent bloke are the real perpetrators behind mass surveillance and big brother.

pixxel• 2 years ago

Don’t worry, your dreamy dystopian nightmare is well on the way.

londons_explore• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

"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.

Gigachad2• 2 years ago

How much do you think a camera costs? They will probably all pay themselves off within a day.

ankit2193• 2 years ago

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

pompino3• 2 years ago

how does it compare versus human error?

lolinder5• 2 years ago

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.

antegamisou2• 2 years ago

Techbros always love citing the supposedly devastating human fallibility yet experience shows poorly configured/developed automated systems are much more of a concern.

ankit2193• 2 years ago

I am not comparing it to a human error. There is a conventional wisdom that humans make mistakes, and we have redundancy built into various systems to counter the same. With machines and tech, the expectation is that they are accurate (which is not true, but mostly true in the important ways). The reason I brought it up is to hope we have that redundancy in this case and future implementations of AI as well. (Horizon had a bug in calculation system - which seems easy and straightforward and hence unexpected and undetected.)

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.

rvnx• 2 years ago

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.

squigz2• 2 years ago

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.

lolinder5• 2 years ago

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.

miki123211• 2 years ago

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.

anon3738393• 2 years ago

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.

ensignavenger5• 2 years ago

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.

Chris20483• 2 years ago

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_boi2• 2 years ago

human receiving the citation can contest it

Only if it is that easy to contest it.

pixl97• 2 years ago

I mean, if you switch the word car to any other dangerous object then yes that is the world I want to live in. "Sorry Bob borrowed my handgun and shot up some stuff" isn't a thing that sounds like it would make the world a better place, and yet we treat cars like they are not death machines if misused.

Gigachad2• 2 years ago

If your friend borrows your car and gets a fine in that time, you can pass the fine on to them. If they don't pay it, you can reconsider your friendship with them and possibly take legal action if it's a large fine.

benhurmarcel• 2 years ago

SO the fine goes to the registered owner of the vehicle, so folks won't want to lend vehicles

You just declare who was driving when you receive the fine, if it's not you. It already works this way in many countries.

hi-v-rocknroll2• 2 years ago

Neither Kafka, Joseph Heller, nor Huxley could conceive of technology-enabled ubiquitous, concealed brutality and extortion. The Western world is rapidly flirting with the specters of pre-crime and automated enforcement that puts the burden on the accused to prove their innocence with Hobson choices while extorting fees from average citizens as a profit-center.

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.

schutt• 2 years ago

Anzeigenhauptmeister just lost his Hobby :(

nashashmi2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

acdha8• 2 years ago

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.

kouru2252• 2 years ago

You could say this about all enforcement. In the exact same way that organized crime is driven to tax evasion, petty crime is driven to fake license plates etc. That’s not necessary a bad thing.

chaos_emergent2• 2 years ago

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.

toast02• 2 years ago

There are benefit for the city and its people if this encouages compliance, even if it doesn't pay for itself.

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.

duxup3• 2 years ago

I’m all for requiring a human to give out tickets of all or any kind.

PeterisP6• 2 years ago

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.

duxup3• 2 years ago

I'd rather they be onsite, that's what I was thinking.

iaseiadit2• 2 years ago

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.

flawsofar3• 2 years ago

look up “broken windows policing”

iaseiadit2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

The idea is to keep unenforced laws on the books, so they can be selectively enforced against one's political enemies.

hi-v-rocknroll2• 2 years ago

Doesn't really scale well. What you're looking for is community-led policing combined with sensible, few surprises, high community-visibility and -participation legislative processes rather than revenue-led or self-led policing.

throwaway22032• 2 years ago

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.

kouru2252• 2 years ago

This is such a public transit power move

someonehere• 2 years ago

“ 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.”

I’m seeing too many comments jumping to conclusions before reading this paragraph. A human will check the footage and make a final call

AI-powered cameras installed on Metro buses to ticket illegally parked cars

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