There's no need for violence. In fact, the capital outlay would be inefficient.

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.

“More Dunkin”? Is that an auto correct type for “more common”?

Yeah, like the ADA for example. We should not have started down that slippery slope. Repeal the ADA!

Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law. 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. 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.

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.

Presumably they don't want you taking videos of people who aren't in fact breaking the law and profiting from tickets. NYC regulation requires you to not idle more than 5 minutes.

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

Although they don't require you to actually take a 5 minute video it is overwhelmingly likely that most people don't pull out there phone every time a vehicle stops in NYC so that most 3 minute videos are liable to be of 5 minute idles.

There are obviously 2 types of problem children cheaters and dummies. It's easier for cheaters to take a 1 minute video since even those who don't intend to idle for any substantial time may pause a moment. For dummies making them actually sit there and film 3 minutes decreases the chance that they will accidentally misunderstand how much time has passed. People are heavily biased towards their own benefits and are liable to miss-perceive 4.5 minutes as 5. Less possible when he pulled out his phone at the 2+ minute mark and now has to wait 3 minutes to have enough.

Put some automation in front of it

Wouldn't it make more sense to charge per report?

As a user I’d be happy to pay $5 for a bundle of credits and just top up whenever it runs out.

And as you say you don’t want to be in the position where a whale costs you $50 by submitting a crazy number of requests.

Maybe these are big-scale problems though :)

Maybe the commercial driver has asthma too and needs to run the AC.

Your kid's asthms would appreciate more if there were fewer cars on roads and logistics leaned more on robust public transportation rather than putting the onus on individual household to own and operate multi-tonne vehicles.

That’s the problem. Major polluters have convinced people it’s the small scale production to attack rather than the giant industrial polluters. We also allow incredibly inefficient engines that produce lots of pollution.

How about a pollution credit trading program then? If my efficient car produces way less pollution than your gas-guzzling truck, I should get the room to idle until I reach our agreed max.

A technological snitch program is a weird and messed up outcome when we ignore the base problems.

But, cool technical achievement. I’m scared that a similar parking snitch program is all too easy as well. Car parked 3.5 hours in a 3hr max neighbourhood? Get them fined and get a sweet bounty! Thanks I hate it.

Laws will be enforced if it's safe and profitable to do so, especially if the process can be fully automated.

Meanwhile, industrial-scale shoplifting, hard drugs, sex crimes, riots. No automated enforcement possible there, let alone profitable automated enforcement.

I get your take and agree with the sentiment BUT I don't think this somehow requires "automatic punishment". Also, if the laws are there then I tend to think they should be enforced. Maybe this kind of thing will empower places to drop some of the laws most folks agree are "slightest infractions".

New York City doesn't do this for "even the slightest infractions at all times".

The idling regulations are based on real harm, and the reporting requirements include things like recording video to prove that the car you're reporting didn't start idling in the last 5 seconds, but has, in fact, been doing that for 3 minutes or longer, or 1 minute or longer adjacent to a school.

More info here: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...

You have to actually submit a 3:01 (or 1:01) minute video as part of the report for that to be actionable.

And, yes, I would really, really want to live in a society where unnecessary idling is not allowed. And if I was living next to a street corner where that happens regularly, I would be on that street corner recording videos any time I'd have free time, and more, if I had babies, who are especially vulnerable to air pollution, living with me.

In Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker showed crime can be discouraged if the expected punishment outweighs the reward. Expected punishment has not one, but two important factors: How big the punishment is, and how likely the punishment is to actually be levied.

Punishment likelihood depends on how likely the crime is to be detected in the first place. Older societies such as medieval Europe or Qing dynasty era China used the death penalty for so many seemingly minor things, and this formula was a big part of why. State authorities at that period of human history had a very low chance of actually detecting something like forgery. So in order to deter criminals they had to ratchet up just how big the potential punishment actually was if you did get caught.

Conversely, as our societies have improved their ability to detect crimes, our stomach for policies like “Forgery is punishable by death” has rightfully taken a nosedive. So, yes, the trend I've seen across the centuries suggests to me I might well prefer to live in a society where the detection rate is higher than it currently is. There's no reason to suspect we've hit upon the optimal point for human flourishing where we are now.

I would like to live in a society where everyone is strictly following traffic regulations. Almost every rule there is written with someone's blood.

Also basics driving rules like zip merge will make traffic better.

This is why optimal policy design has the fines get paid directly from the violator to the reporter. That brings its own quirks, but they're all surprisingly tractable with other market mechanisms.

There's a whole literature on this topic in economics under mechanism design. They've been a longstanding research interest of mine, I consider it almost like the land value tax of legal enforcement by this point.

And the cost is often on the small business owner

It’s just a game of cat and mouse. I dont think there is a way to “win”, because it’s so easy to make new graffiti, and not practical to try and police and catch people in the act. I think they require private property owners to clean their own graffiti, which really sucks, but makes it more manageable for the city to focus on public areas.

The city really just has a queue of cleanup sites and priorities locations that are high visibility or important, like school yards or transit infrastructure. An elementary school nearby had its mural destroyed by graffiti, and it was cleaned up within a day.

San Francisco does the sensible thing and fines the property owner. This is the just and right thing. In fact, I strongly support putting victims of drunk driving in jail: this strongly disincentivizes driving near drunk drivers.

> This has nothing to do with "milking motorists"

Forcing motorists to pay for minor infractions is the entire point of the app.

We absolutely do that all the time?

Most cities have ways for neighbors to report things like this.

> Win-win for who exactly?

Society at large? All the people who don't have the breathe the fumes of some garbage commercial vehicle.

> Your backyard fence looks DIY

Provided it's up for code, whether it was "done yourself" or not doesn't matter.

> your porch light looks like a fire hazard.

Absolutely this should be reported.

They're trialing something like that in France. There's a project that uses machine learning on aerial photography databases to search for objects in peoples' backyards, for enforcement,

https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/30/23328442/france-ai-swimmi... ("French government uses AI to spot undeclared swimming pools — and tax them / The government used machine learning to scan aerial photos of properties")

I lived in China for many many years and this is not a good example. Parking, and driving in general, is chaotic and unregulated. Yes, you have cameras everywhere that detect running on red or taking a wrong lane, but that's about makes it. Speeding, haphazard parking, everything is allowed. Scooters go anywhere. Bikes go anywhere. People go anywhere. Red, green, anything in between, it's a free for all. Like a policeman smoking under "no smoking" signs is totally normal. I'd say, you can get away with mostly anything in China, nobody would care (unless you're non-Chinese, then dutiful neighbors will report your every sneeze).

PS: Yet I do find OP's idea reminding me of China. Having a society that polices itself (just in China it's more about thought, not behavior) is definitely not a thing I would enjoy.

Okay, that makes it a little less dystopian.

But you make money off people snitching.

And you're setting the stage for something far worse, imo.

False dichotomy. Both the snitch and the polluter are bad guys.

If you want an example of widespread application of this idea in a society, look at China. I rest my case.

That's a fair point. It's hard to assess whether I'm being honest with myself about that.

But I know this app is truly evil in my system of morality.

AI art can be very soulless. Very dehumanizing. In certain sense.

But those two qualities are undeniably attached to surveillance states. In all senses. There is no argument against that.

> 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.

> I hate when I pass a long-idling truck and can taste it in the air.

And I hate living in a surveillance state.

You mean when he said “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” or something else?