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

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194 points rafram | 1 comments | 22 Jun 25 17:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source

New York City has this cool program that lets anyone report idling commercial vehicles and get a large cut of the fines [1]. It's been in the news recently [2].

I've filed a few reports, and I found the process frustrating and error-prone. The forms are fiddly, there's way too much information that needs to be copied down from the video by hand, you have to use a third-party app to take a timestamped video and a different app to compress it before uploading, and approximately none of it can be done on your phone — the device you probably used to record your video in the first place.

I built Idle Reporter to make filing complaints into a five-minute process that you can do entirely from your phone.

Idle Reporter uses AI to automatically extract all the required information and screenshots from the video and fill out the form for you. It compresses your video, adds the required screenshots, and uploads the whole thing to DEP. All you have to do is log in, give it a final check, and submit.

The AI features cost me money to run, so I put those behind a subscription ($5.99/month, which can pay for itself after a single report). There's a one-week free trial so you can test it out. All the other features — including a fully-featured timestamp camera, which other apps charge for, and an editor for filling out the forms manually and submitting in a single step — will be free forever, as a service to the community.

The app is iOS-only for now — part of this was an exercise in learning SwiftUI in my spare time.

Check it out on the App Store and let me know what you think!

[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...

[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-idling-law-report...

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Nifty3929 ◴[22 Jun 25 19:17 UTC] No.44349510[source]▶
I feel it's Orwellian, or Stalin-esq to have us being paid off to snitch on each other.

Certainly, if you have evidence of murder or something, please do report it.

But for an idling vehicle?

Note that these laws are only targeting idling while parked, rather than during normal use, such as at a traffic light. This is called "true-idling" or "long-duration" idling.

Has anybody considered how much CO2 or other greenhouse gases are actually released by "true-idling" or "long-duration" idling vehicles, either individually or in aggregate? I spent a few minutes researching it with an LLM and couldn't come up with much. Most of the information and numbers I got were for ALL idling, including during normal driving like at a traffic light. My guess based on that is that it (true idling) is a trivially small amount of CO2 compared to the overall.

But it's plenty to earn yourself a nice payoff at the expense of your hard working delivery driver!

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1. toast0 ◴[22 Jun 25 19:40 UTC] No.44349683[source]▶
> I feel it's Orwellian, or Stalin-esq to have us being paid off to snitch on each other.

Sure, but it's a different kind of dystopia to have commercial vehicles idling and fouling the air outside of normal driving. As described where you have to capture 3 minutes of idling (1 minute near schools) and assuming most people take a while to notice, rather than starting the timer immediately when the vehicle stops, it seems like a reasonable way to enhance compliance.

Idling while parked may not be a large contribution to total emissions, but it's harder to justify than idling in normal operation, and easier to enforce against, so there you go. Sometimes refrigerated transport more or less needs to idle to keep the contents at temperature, not sure if there's exceptions for that or if they just need to retrofit with more insulation or batteries to run the compressor or etc in order to comply.

Idling at lights probably gets reduced by auto start/stop in new vehicles as well as congestion charges reducing traffic and probably dwell time at lights. Auto start/stop isn't a universally loved thing; it makes some cars really frustrating to use, but when done well, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff to reduce unneccesary emissions.