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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: 0.216s | 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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paulgb ◴[22 Jun 25 19:34 UTC] No.44349641[source]▶
I think the intent is less about the CO2 emissions as about the air quality that people have to breathe (hence a stricter standard in some locations).

I don’t know about measurable effects but I hate when I pass a long-idling truck and can taste it in the air.

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1. amanaplanacanal ◴[23 Jun 25 14:34 UTC] No.44356212[source]▶
Diesel exhaust is horrifying. Why aren't diesel engines subject to the same pollution regulations as the rest of us?