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194 points rafram | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | 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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matsemann ◴[] No.44349457[source]
Man, I wish my city would make it possible to report drivers breaking the law. My big issue is cars parking in the cycle lanes. 1830 cars got fined for that in my city in total in 2024. Aka 5 a day. As a single cyclist I see more cars parked in cycle lanes every day on my commute than all those hundred officers give tickets to in total..
replies(1): >>44349576 #
cosmic_cheese ◴[] No.44349576[source]
What I’d like to see is hard separation of roads and bike lanes. As a cyclist, nothing but a line painted on the road makes me feel unsafe, as a driver it’s difficult to not get nervous when passing a cyclist in the lane, and culturally drivers are generally favored over cyclists which results in things like parking in bike lanes not being adequately enforced. All these things would be solved by bike lanes being fully independent from the road.
replies(1): >>44349814 #
josephcsible ◴[] No.44349814[source]
> What I’d like to see is hard separation of roads and bike lanes.

That's a great idea, as long as the hard separation goes both ways with bikes no longer being allowed in car lanes.

replies(3): >>44349927 #>>44349963 #>>44357696 #
1. cosmic_cheese ◴[] No.44349927[source]
Doable, but would probably require bike paths to be wider than they currently are and split into two lanes: one for road bikers and one for everybody else.