Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by endisneigh 1539 days ago
I’m surprised governments haven’t already made an official app to “democratize” traffic enforcement.

- take a video of someone double parking: fine

- take a video of someone idling their car too long: fine

Once it gets a critical mass (I’d estimate a relatively small usage around 15%) I’d imagine traffic law breaking will go away for the most part.

The inability to know when you might be recorded and consequently fined would lead most to simply stop doing it.

The only other necessary thing would be to increase fines to be more in line with the ability to pay to be a useful deterrent.

Add in a kickback of say 30% to those who report once fine is collected and you’ve just created a highly motivated, distributed and invisible traffic law enforcement apparatus.

There are some technical challenges to be solved, though.

4 comments

It’s because a big part of its citizens (like me) considers that a form of vigilantism and I will absolutely not support anything like that.
How is taking a picture of an illegal parked car and sending it to the police any different than calling the police? And why would you call it vigilantism?
Until before the second to last paragraph, I'm fully with you on this idea. Especially when using the bike it's very frustrating that there is no (ideally low-friction) way to report people parking on bike lanes.

But I think that something like the 30% kick-back will result in a massive increase of people who will somehow construct issues artificially, just to make more money. IMHO it should be plenty to just provide a simple way to report actual annoyances.

A few days ago there's this report about citizens reporting idling trucks in NY: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/nyregion/clean-air-idle-c...
Like in Nazi Germany or like Communist East Germany?