Show HN: Report idling vehicles in NYC (and get a cut of the fines) with AI

Like letting the police install a permanent speed trap on your property or even pay for the privilege of them doing so. I'd bet that'd curb a lot of speeding in short order

If you want to curb speeding, the solution looks much the same: Pay reporters some portion of the fines collected from the speeder. You will very quickly see a cottage industry of Internet connected dashcams and on-board AI solutions spring up, because it's practically free money if you drive safely yourself for long enough. Pretty soon nobody will be speeding, simply because you never know who or what is watching.

This is a set of economic-legal policies I've been writing about here and there for a long time. It's great stuff.

You also have it backwards because it already reliably makes society better for you. Take the case of Biogen employee Michael Bawduniak, who spent seven years documenting covert payments that steered doctors toward Biogen’s multiple‑sclerosis drugs illegally. When the United States Department of Justice settled the case for $900 million in 2022, Bawduniak received roughly $266 million, or about 30% of the federal proceeds, under the False Claims Act. It's a very similar mechanism, and anyone you may know who suffers from multiple sclerosis has likely had their treatment options materially improved thanks to Bawduniak's actions. But those kinds of actions only happen when you have the right mechanisms in place, to reward people who do the right thing.

This type of thing can get out of hand quickly. Without me giving controversial examples, just imagine for yourself the types of things that different states can make a crime, add a fine, then offer to give other citizens part or all of that fine if they turn in others. After that, think of how unscrupulous businesses could use it against competition.

As for businesses using it against one another in competition: Same deal, I think that's an excellent thing. If this idling law causes NYC businesses to shift en masse to faster loading and unloading practices because their competitors are watching them like hawks, I don't think that's a bad thing.

You are entitled to your opinion of course but it just seems extremely arbitrary.

EDIT: I've been away from the States for too long. I was indeed thinking about speed bumps, not traps. Traps are cameras, and they therefore get a thumbs up from me in the beautiful bounties-on-everything-we-care-about future.

Are you talking about speed bumps?

Agree. More of my thought is what happens when everyone is incentivized with money to spy on everyone else? How can you misuse this as a government? How can unscrupulous businesses misuse this?

>If switching to a fine-based bounty system like this suddenly causes an uproar over a given law, then I submit the proper thing is to look over that law and perhaps tear it down.

I would submit that there is the danger that people might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.

>Any "law" that people put up with because it isn't enforced 9 times out of 10 is little more than a tax upon those too honest to get away with it.

Think a little harder and see if you can imagine why a law that isn't strongly enforced still might exist.

I think the idea is vaguely that the upper-upper class statistically must've done something wrong or have the power to cause extreme harm, therefore it's okay to snitch on them but not your regular Joe.

I'm just espousing the standard American middle class views about freedom here. Not trying to argue they are sound or rational.

I've said elsewhere the optimal mechanism here is for that money to be paid to the snitcher, from the person who is being turned in. This would lead us to assume that for most crimes of a personal nature, we would have about as many people losing money due to the law as making money due to it, and so the effect cancels out.

In situations where many more people make money and only a select few are losing big, well... Somehow I feel like that's usually for the best anyway. See my other comments on eg the runaway success of the False Claims Act. Or just consider the class action lawsuit and whether you think it fills a valuable role in society.

>Think a little harder and see if you can imagine why a law that isn't strongly enforced still might exist.

Thanks for letting me pick the reason, that's very thoughtful of you. Obviously it's because said law being strongly enforced would cause such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety, and thus further erode the monopoly on violence the state holds over its citizenry. Cops then have fewer en passants they can pull when they don't follow procedure, etc etc. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.

Scared of MAGA targeting brown people with this type of social enforcement

Not really. If perfect, ubiquitious enforcement were possible, our laws would probably look very different.

In some cases, which seem like a good idea like corporate malfeasance whistleblowers or government grift whistleblowers. This is because the people paid by our tax dollars would be at a disadvantage compared to an insider in the company. In others, you could see the direction it must go.

>Thanks for letting me pick the reason, that's very thoughtful of you.

Cheers!

>Obviously it's because said law being strongly enforced would cause such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety, and thus further erode the monopoly on violence the state holds over its citizenry. Cops then have fewer en passants they can pull when they don't follow procedure, etc etc. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.

There might very well be laws like that. However, let me offer a non-controversial and obvious one. Speed limits. Many places have 65mph listed as a speed limit. Everyone knows you are not allowed to go faster. However very few place will pull you over for going 66mph or even 70mph. If they started pulling over everyone going 70 in a 65 there would not be "such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety" because we all know and they all knew they were breaking the law. But it isn't enforced in an authoritarian way because we have different vehicles, sometimes you need to pass, and frankly 70 and 65 just aren't that big of a problem. But almost everyone would agree that we do need a speed limit, although they might not agree on the number and a number has to be picked.

Now, I don't want to assume your political leanings, but I am getting some strong libertarian vibes. And you seem like a nice and thoughtful person, so maybe bad ideas don't even occur to you because you are honest and just don't think that way. But imagine, or go ask grok, some other ways this could work out. And while you are at it, imagine a law that did not effect all citizens the same. Now imagine that a bad law could effect a relatively small group much more than others. In what way could they cause affect a backlash that would quickly get a law repealed in its entirety?

Using money to incentivize any public action on behalf of the government should be a sort of last-resort situation where it makes sense and the people already being paid to do it can't for some reason. This is a very libertarian idea, in fact. A more reasonable idea, although much less libertarian, would be to pass a law that makes it where cars can not idle for more than a specified amount of time in certain situations, but that would come with its own can of worms don't you think? And I personally wouldn't be for such a law. In fact I am against the snitch on idlers law. If someone wants to pay $7 a gallon for gas to set there and idle it away, why shouldn't they be able to? How is it different than them driving the same gas away?

Conversely, under an enforcement regime where everyone is genuinely scared to go higher than 65, the worst case scenario is... Everyone does 65. Fewer accidents, and fewer fatalities from those accidents. Best case scenario is they rapidly revise up to 70 - 75 - wherever.

Re/ "imagine that a bad law could effect a relatively small group much more than others", I think we would have to define more closely what a 'bad law' actually is to answer that first. Under this kind of fine-based regime, it would have to be something that targets a small group, unfairly, and manages to consistently extract a lot of money from them, which requires they have a lot of money to reliably extract in the first place - otherwise it stops being worth the effort to target them specifically.

I guess you could imagine making lottery scratch tickets a fineable offense, and thereby target pensioners unfairly. That's the closest I got after 5 minutes of thinking about it.

Re/ using money to incentivize public action - we have clashing moral intuitions on this, I definitely don't see it as a last resort. In fact I would far prefer it to be the first resort. Money is a much more efficient, scalable, precise, and robust way of handling things than e.g. sending people to prison (which we still have to pay for, by the way, prisons aren't cheap).

Re/ the idler's law itself - You're allowed to be against it personally, that's fine. The people of New York City voted in favor of it, and they probably have good reasons for this that mostly only make sense to themselves. Personally, I've been to New York, and seen how cramped those streets are. It doesn't surprise me that some schmuck holding up half of 6th Avenue should be made to pay for it - they are likely causing thousands of dollars of cash flow loss per second because on who's late for work because of them. But even then, I don't live there. I don't actually have a good sense of this kind of thing. I defer to the wisdom of the locals here. Do as the Romans do.

Then do you arrest all people going 71?

> I think we would have to define more closely what a 'bad law' actually is to answer that first. Under this kind of fine-based regime, it would have to be something that targets a small group, unfairly, and manages to consistently extract a lot of money from them

Is suspect everyone can hypothesize a small group they belong to. So make up one that you belong to and imagine a group coming into power in the legislature where you live that makes that kind of law. The money itself doesn't need to be a large amount (what might be "a lot" to you and I might be different for different people) to make it oppressive and frankly a weapon for the police and government to use.

>Re/ the idler's law itself ... The people of New York City voted in favor of it

Correct. I don't agree with it but the local people do. This is the both the blessing and curse of our government and the exact situation where some people can can use this pay-for-snitching technique for good or bad. If it works for them then so be it. I don't have to like it. I don't like a lot of stuff. And some stuff I do like others don't. My original argument is that using money as an incentive to turn citizens against each other is a very slippery slope. In his case it might be great for them. I understand that you and I disagree on this point and there is likely nothing I can say or you can say to make the other suddenly change position and I respect you defending your thought process on this. But it is nice to be able to have a conversation about something controversial without it spinning into something else. Cheers!

Think bigger. If the activity were really a money-maker, then it will inevitably be scaled and industrialized. A cottage industry of snitching would spring up. If that industry got sufficiently wealthy and politically powerful, we'd see all kinds of "easy-bounty" laws getting enacted to allow these companies to further sponge up fines from the public.

If speeding fines were shared with whoever reported them, I guarantee 100% that companies would buy real estate every 10 miles along every freeway and put up speeding cameras to automate it.

(EDIT: Looks like you also already predicted the speed trap cottage industry in another comment. Oh, well, I'll leave this one up too)

You mean if a red state (like Texas) potentially handing out bounties for snitching on abortions? Texas already passed that law in 2022[1]. We are already way down the slippery slope you alluded.

1. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/11/1107741175/texas-abortion-bou...

Accidents on the highway do not happen because people don’t agree on the speed to drive at, more than they happen because “cars exist”. They happen because drivers drive faster than their capacity to avoid danger. This capacity differs from hour to hour and day to day. Agreeing on a speed doesn’t make one less drunk or sleepy or unskilled, and so on. More accidents happen on the day after summer time switch when drivers have less sleep and it’s not like everyone just changes opinions.

You’re missing the elephant in the room. Not everyone is equally capable of buying laws or fighting the enforcement of those laws. When Musk’s datacenter was photographed polluting more than declared it wasn’t an instant fine, it’s a lawsuit that the taxpayer pays for (implicit fine on the taxpayer). He can afford it, but how much of this can taxpayers take? These are the people who can buy a law to make your life harder if you try to catch them red handed with something. They’re the ones who can see that you get fined when you say something that’s false or just inconvenient or not yet decided by a judge (like that most accidents caused by disagreement on speed, or that Musk’s DC pollutes more than declared) while they can afford to keep doing it themselves because for them everything becomes a lawsuit they can drag on forever, can afford, and costs you money too.

Making free money sounds awesome. But coming from a country which in the past “democratized” and incentivized reporting “bad” behavior, no matter how much you think this time it’s a worthy cause, it just opens the door up to abuse against the weaker members of society, and almost everyone becomes weaker as a result. You don’t see where this goes because you’ve never seen it with your eyes and don’t trust reading a book.

I'm curious, when there will be apps to report citizens that threat democracy. Like those who wear red hat. Or sleepong on street. Or make weird talks at home...

I hate people leaving cars idling, but I don't like any form of bounty app. This is the wrong kind of law enforcement.

Could you link some examples of such comments because I can't find them, please?

> Or just consider the class action lawsuit and whether you think it fills a valuable role in society.

This is an odd one. They are extremely rare in the UK, but in practice I think we have better consumer protection because it's handled through ordinary politics and legislation, rather than litigation.

ref. https://www.osborneclarke.com/insights/what-status-class-act...

I also wonder how this is going to interact with politically connected people who are used to ignoring the law, such as Cuomo https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/06/16/no-mo-cuomo-scofflaw-...

- traffic designers lay out road

- there is nowhere for delivery trucks to park, or extremely limited parking

- this is justified by a lengthy set of arguments about other road users

- deliveries still need to be made

- truck parks in bus lane, cycle lane, or on the pedestrian paving (cracking slabs!)

- everyone is now mad with each other, on the street or in the local newspapers

Actually, no one is capable of 'buying' a law. Laws are passed via the processes of the legislative system. Sure, you can try to bribe someone like a Congressman into voting for or against certain things, but this is very different from just buying a law outright, and people are constantly watching Congressmen to ensure this kind of behavior doesn't get too out of hand.

"Nobody ever catches those bribes in practice." Gee, it sounds like you have a crime detection issue there. If only there were some decentralized mechanism, trending towards a 100% success rate, by which individual actors could personally benefit by exposing with evidence a Congressman took a bribe. :)

Apropos: The SEC whistleblower program has so far distributed over $2 billion to nearly 400 corporate insiders since 2011, and shows no sign of slowing down. We aren't lacking for success stories here when it comes to stopping shady financial deals, they're actually one of the easiest cases to handle.

>When Musk’s datacenter was photographed polluting more than declared it wasn’t an instant fine, it’s a lawsuit that the taxpayer pays for (implicit fine on the taxpayer).

You sound like you have a lot of knowledge about this case. If you were to share your knowledge with someone else who was pursuing this fine, so they could get a cut out of it, you could probably get paid yourself for doing so. Maybe you could have submitted more photographs, or air quality measurements, or just conversations with people working at the datacenter (who might themselves be getting paid a cut of your cut by you).

In so doing, you would have made the case against Musk stronger, and made it more likely the fine would be levied in the first place. If the crime actually happened, of course. Those are the kinds of strategies a "fine paid to the successful reporter" approach to legal enforcement allows for. They simply have no analogue in other approaches to the law. They operate on self-interest, not fear.

This is also an much, much more powerful way by which the "weaker members of society" you are concerned with can work together at scale to take down and prosecute a much larger entity. One thing the disenfranchised do very well is information gathering. If you're unemployed or underemployed anyway, and you just have this burning passion of hating Musk or Richard Ramirez copycat killers or money launderers or child predators or whatever floats your boat, it would be very encouraging to know you might be able to eke out a living simply by investigating their crimes on your own time and getting paid for it by someone, without necessarily needing to get a JD.

>while they can afford to keep doing it themselves because for them everything becomes a lawsuit they can drag on forever, can afford, and costs you money too.

"Phase 2 of this process is incurably too slow anyway, so we might as well not even worry about optimizing Phase 1" is an engineering issue. It requires you to make a judgment call about whether Phase 1 is already 'good enough' as it is.

Considering that the lawsuit generally happens only after prosecution, the vast majority of information gathering, and back office work, what you are implying here is that you think all of that preceding work is already handled so competently that there's no reason in worrying about it. It's no longer the bottleneck of the system.

Very few people would agree with that.

>coming from a country which in the past “democratized” and incentivized reporting “bad” behavior

As far as I'm aware no democratic country has yet instituted fine-based bounties widely across its executive apparatus. So I don't actually know which country you could be referring to.

If, however, you're talking about a democratic country where this approach is employed in certain areas of legal enforcement, I would point out that, if you live in the United States, you actually still live under such a regime. See the SEC whistleblower's cases mentioned above, or the FBI's Most Wanted list.

The reason you don't hear about them very often is both due to their currently specialized nature, and because they just... Work. Quietly, in the background.

So far I haven't heard anyone complaining about the Orwellian dystopia that the False Claims Act is creating for good honest hedge fund managers who just want to maximize their portfolio earnings, although I'm sure they're out there.

> Exceptions include, but are not limited to, when an idling on-road medium/heavy-duty vehicle is: Stuck in traffic or otherwise required to remain motionless. Performing maintenance tasks or powering an auxiliary function or apparatus, such as a refrigeration unit or lift, requiring power from the primary motive engine.

[0] https://dec.ny.gov/environmental-protection/air-quality/cont...

As a result, speeding is very common here. Australia is a totally different story.

The example I like to use is littering. If I lived near a high traffic area, and there was a $200 fine, $100 payable to the first successful reporter, you'd better believe I would invest in some webcams and some software to do nothing but watch for signs of littering nearby 24/7, run the last 15 seconds through AI to weed out false positives, and maybe even file the report automatically on my behalf. That's almost literally money lying on the sidewalk.

At first I would probably make thousands with a $20 webcam and some manual review. Even one true positive pays for itself 5 times over. Eventually other people on my block would start doing a similar thing. The fine can only get paid to one person, usually the person who "gets there the fastest with the mostest". So then there is competitive pressure on me to make my software faster, my webcam higher resolution, my detection methods and ability to prove non-repudiation more reliable.

If you prefer walking through trash I can understand this may dismay you. If you like clean streets, I can think of no better chilling effect to anyone who might be crossing by. You can apply this enforcement mechanism to basically any kind of crime and get similar results - even and especially organized crime, which traditional legal enforcement historically has a very hard time breaking up. Hence why it's already in use by the SEC to break up the highest level of financial crimes, via things like the False Claims Act where often the only way to prove the crime is happening in the first place is to have a man on the inside why can patiently collect evidence for years before making his move. What better way to make something worth a man's time than to pay him?

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/biogen-inc-agrees-pa... " Biogen Inc. Agrees to Pay $900 Million to Settle Allegations Related to Improper Physician Payments"

[2]: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/largest-ever-266-4-... "Largest-Ever $266.4 Million Whistleblower Award in Biogen False Claims Act Suit"

[3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-26/biogen-to... "Biogen Agrees to Pay $900 Million to Resolve Kickback Claims"

You can also find more official information on the SEC whistleblower program, which I think the False Claims Act itself is under but might just be a mirror similarity, at

[4]: https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/whistleblower-pro...

It's fascinating stuff.

We’re already sliding down the slope, to be sure, but this is an acceleration that we should expect with our eyes wide open.

1. A safety hazard

2. Causes high noise pollution

3. Measurably increases air pollution

Under these circumstances I feel like a citizen driven enforcement for the law is not quite bad as you are portraying it. I would even call it apploudable, because they increase the quantity of life for everyone in their neighborhood.

In this case I have a wonderful bridge to sell you.

Of course they can. It's called lobbying and it's literally aimed at convincing representatives to support certain policies or laws. When a lot of money is involved it's no different from buying those laws.

> As far as I'm aware no democratic country has yet instituted fine-based bounties widely across its executive apparatus. So I don't actually know which country you could be referring to.

Of course you don't. It's why I literally said you "don’t trust reading a [history] book". History isn't limited to what and where you lived. I shouldn't need to nudge you in the right direction.

> So far I haven't heard anyone

Going back to those books, you haven't heard a lot of things. You have such strong opinions despite (or maybe because) showing so little knowledge or understanding of things in the present or in history. On top of the couple of things I pointed out just by skimming your comment, you compare using the public for the apprehending people on FBI's most wanted list with people helping catch the dreaded "engine idler".

You can run a thought experiment to confirm this. Suppose 1/2 of all crimes committed in your area currently get reported. You are offered the option to move to two new places, identical in every way to your starting point, except New Town A has 3/4 of the crimes committed get reported*. New Town B has only 1/4 of the crimes committed get reported. Do you move? Where to?

The important thing to notice is less that New Town A seems like a pretty good deal, than that New Town B seems like a really bad one. Plenty of people would move to New Town A for the obvious additional security. Some of people would elect to stay, for reasons like New Town A isn't guaranteed to be exactly like where you currently are into the future, and home is home. But almost nobody would move to New Town B. The people who would jump for joy at moving to New Town B may even be criminals themselves trying to escape charges or just hedge their futures.

* For the sake of completeness, you can consider this property preserved across different types of crime. E.g. if 90% of homicides get reported in your current locale, 95% do in New Town A, and only 45% in New Town B do. If 20% of money laundering schemes get reported, 60% do in New Town A, and 10% in New Town B. Etc. The general idea of everything being more or less detectable is more important than the specific numbers.

What's the lie? They are just going 70 in a 65... that's not a lie.

What unproductive pedantry. I find your comments exhausting because of their wordiness that stands in contrast to the ridiculous assumptions that your verbosity hides.

A lot of civil penalties carry fines in excess of what you get for a first offense for a violent but not professional criminality type crime. It's absolutely insane. NYC's idling laws are just the tip of the iceberg in this regard. And the fact that these are "civil" penalties means the due process requirements are basically nil and when they do exist (like they do for traffic infractions) they basically only exist so far as they need to to keep the racket going.

Like you'd be hard pressed to wind up with tens of thousands of of fines doing actual criminal stuff, they'd just throw you in jail. But a government official can notice (or be tipped off to) some violation then go look back at their info sources and decide unilaterally when the violation started and fine you for presumed months of violation and you often have no recourse but to sue.

Then what what underpins the fines?

The guy who reports one person for driving 100mph over the limit can and ought to sleep soundly knowing society more or less agrees with his actions.

The guy who reports 100 people for going 1mph over the limit ought to be be worried. His actions are not something society generally thinks is a good thing.

Arbitration is done by the NYC Dept of Environmental Protection. While it is unknown whether their workers are white collar, no evidence of snoot is manifested.

If an area doesn't support trucks, then deliveries need to be made without trucks. That means parking the truck far away and using a hand truck to make the delivery on foot using the sidewalks.

The shipping companies can either eat the cost, pass it on to consumers or refuse to deliver to those areas.

This is the post to which you mention Bawduniak in reply to gametorch:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349951

Algolia doesn't seem to let you search for some comments, not sure if [dead] or [flagged][dead] show up there. I found this via your comments link from your profile. I also have showdead enabled on my HN profile, which is necessary to see these comments on the comment page for a HN submission, but not to view them via a direct link iiuc.

Besides, we don't have anything like this now, and I'm not walking through trash in the city I live in. If you have trash everywhere, you have other problems.

Or if you need to avoid the a-word because of the particular fruit that falls from that tree when shaken, just look at predatory towing.

In most cases, there is room for them to park: the solution is simply for delivery companies to lobby for loading zones where there are currently parking spots for private cars. Drivers will never agree to this though, so here we are.