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Swedish company Scout Park has launched a mobile app where you can tip off wrongly parked cars to traffic wardens to earn money
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- Title
- New Swedish app gives money for reporting wrongly parked cars
- Published
- Apr 11 2024
- Word count
- 166 words
Heh, the sign of a functioning society with well designed parking rules and zones I guess.
Here in Czechia this is not the case, so if every parking rule was suddenly being enforced to the letter, the parking capacity would instantly lower I assume about 20% in some areas. This partly happened when the city started residential parking zones, because they had to paint them according to current rules, reducing the capacity.
So the job of the police is to enforce rules that actually make sense and ignore those that do not. Which usually kind of works.
This is not ideal, but it's unfortunately unavoidable because the only part of the solution to increased number of cars (though not nearly as dramatic as it could be, many younger millenials and zoomers only buy them once they actually need to) that got implemented is to tax them more, but not to actually create parking spots where they don't pose a problem (like parking lots at the end of public transport routes) or to enforce rules when building new residential areas (underground parking is theoretically mandatory for all new buildings, but the fine, in other words the cost to just ignore the rule, is lower than the cost to build it).
This is kind of a major problem that fosters corruption and abuses of power. Can't speak to how it is in Czechia, but here in the USA, the police have a lot of power to draw from a nearly endless pool of possible rarely-enforced offenses if it suits them.
It makes a bit of sense for a touch of leeway and discression, but being able to wholesale ignore or enforce laws at a whim is a dangerous thing.
Oh believe me, I'm not saying it's good. Of course laws that are usually ignored but can be selectively enforced to punish undesirables (especially if it's a dumb law that is hard to abide) are terrible. But specifically with parking, until the rules actually make sense, it's the lesser evil. Paying people (even teenagers) to tip off bad parking would make things worse.
Also our police seem to be considerably calmer and more down to earth on average than in the US, likely because their jobs are less dangerous (violent crime is quite rare here) and because they seem to get a lot more training and a bit more scrutiny. That also helps.
My first assumption would be that it’s due to different training. I have no idea what your country’s policing is like, mind — I just know that here in the States police tend to be trained to be very nervous and trigger-happy. It’s not healthy for anyone, including the cops themselves.
I mean I don’t disagree, but it’s also the case that American criminals are also more likely to be dangerous gun carrying lunatics. That is to say, there is an element of risk in American policing that is not pure paranoia.
Creating more parking leads to more cars in the streets. Not a solution.
Honestly as long as public transport works well I don't care.
I have a feeling that many people online read about car centered infrastructure in the US and conclude that cars are a terrible evil in any situation. The city I live in has excellent public transport, reasonably priced bikes for rent, and the wider center is walkable. I do want to give public transport more priority in places with high traffic and I want more separate bike lanes, but I see no good reason to restrict cars any more.
There are good reasons to own a car and the problem of pretty much all car restrictions is that they target the poor working class the most. I am against that.
Im not sure Id be excited about the prospect of incentivizing people to 'snitch' on other people. I believe history has shown that to be a dark path to go down, and while parking violations are pretty minor, it seems counter to the logic of a freer society to say 'report to the authorities when your fellow citizens are not following the rules and we will take care of them.'
I already despise local bylaw complaints that allow people to complain anonymously - if you have a problem with a neighbor, the mature and responsible thing to do is to talk to them and discuss and resolve the matter, not call the authorities anonymously and hope they get fined. That should be a last resort.
Man, I wish I had an easy way to report cars parked entirely across the bike lanes, or using them as informal loading/unloading zones. They're making life harder for every cyclist who has to merge with car traffic. You call it snitching, I call it trying to maintain public consideration in the face of individual priorities that incentivize inconveniencing everyone else. I don't have time, power, or inclination to hassle every asshole delivery driver, but if there was a format to snap a photo and report them for a fine I'd do that every time without shame.
But then again I'm living in an area where there are far more people than I have any sort of social connection to. Perhaps a quiet chat with a neighbor would work in a smaller area?
While it's hard to argue against being able to easily report violations, it feels very dangerous to incentivize them. For one, it undermines the more basic levels of social trust that justify the use of violence implied by policing when everyone you meet has a good* reason to make something up about you or another person, not to mention the 1-in-100 (or in 20 or whatever small-but-significant rate) cases where the person parking illegally
It's not like this is some slippery slope from "parking snitching" to a police state, but it's pretty well-documented that secret police forces alienate people from their communities and are a powerful tool for any totalitarian hopefuls, and there's no reason to believe this wouldn't normalize those same dynamics.
Much like the principle of assuming good faith in conversation may be unworkable at large scale, but assuming the opposite cannot foster better conversation even if it is necessary as a coping mechanism for people in those large-scale communities, perhaps the issue needs to be deconstructed some more before it can be addressed. Ideas like removing private automobiles from urban centers may be more difficult to bring into practice and lead to a wider set of externalities, but they're also much less likely to be applied selectively/abusively and would likely foster community in an opposite way to this easier approach's atomizing effect.
Their inconvenience is my threat to life and limb. I don't really care if they're parking there because of someone else's choices forcing them to. They can be encouraged by the government to not park there. That's the whole point of fines. I also really extra extra don't care if "it's just for a minute." It only takes me a couple of seconds to pass a car length, and having to merge into faster moving traffic to avoid someone parked in the bike lane isn't safe. On a busy route, they can turn their inconvenient lack of parking into danger for dozens of cyclists.
So you can talk about danger in policing and authoritarian trends and larger scale changes in auto use, and sure, all those are useful conversations, but right now you're trying to talk about those while defending prioritizing car users' convenience over my safety, and that makes me not interested in having those other conversations.
Well, your personal investment doesn't really preclude my point. We're talking about a specific implementation of enforcement, not debating "should people block traffic dangerously?" I do apologize for underplaying those risks, but it was really not my point to do so. I'm saying those scenarios are fairly inelastic, and not likely to respond to the fines regardless, and so these hazards are still very real even in a scenario where every asshat who would choose to park in the bike lane decides against it. Therefore, the degradation of interpersonal trust seems like a pretty big cost just so you could be paid to do what you'd already do for free.
Your characterization of my argument feels pretty inaccurate as a result. "Woe be the people who get fines unfairly!" is hardly my point. Like I said at the outset, it's very difficult to argue against being able to report these hazards. Taking huge chunks out of the context, like the profit motive defining the subject at hand, of a debate is so unreasonable that it's hard to take seriously.
Those scenarios are common because of lack of enforcement. They're not inherently so, they're just a low priority for current enforcement, and thus something that currently seems inelastic but I'm fairly certain would change if people were getting fined for it. People wouldn't stop in the middle of the road "just for a minute", if that minute could cost them a couple hundred bucks.
I would personally report on that sort of thing for free, and I do, but I really don't think that providing a financial incentive to reporting on crimes is the end of cultural solidarity the way you seem to. There's already whistleblower rewards for a variety of other crimes, and those haven't done it. What interpersonal trust does a stranger have for you, or you for them at the moment? None that I see.
I think you have a stronger faith in the average driver's ability to make such judgments than I do, after consideration.
Well, fair. Also, that's a bad thing? And it can always get worse. But it isn't about cultural solidarity, just not creating or intensifying the norm of objectifying one another as "violators" for reward.
What whistleblower rewards exist for misdemeanors committed by individuals? I'm unfamiliar.
You think that drivers are so brainless that they can't learn in the face of fines that a behavior is unacceptable? I think I have more faith in people than that. I agree that the standards of interpersonal trust being so low is an issue more broadly in the US, but that seems to me to be an issue of there being such a wide variety of people working under such a variety of priorities that you just can't assume that someone is working to the same ends as you. It's an issue we need to acknowledge but then work with, as that's a much larger question of cultural direction.
As far as whistleblower rewards, there's tons, though not all of the ones on that list are for misdemeanor crimes. Not on that list but one I know about locally, there's rewards for people who report illegal dumping with information leading to the prosecution of the person dumping trash.
I think that drivers who get fined will justify themselves as right to themselves, much like DWI repeat offenders who have access to public transit and cabs. Very few people are perpetrating the severe infractions you're focused on, and they're already disregarding laws and customs, so are very likely to have already come up with self-justifications that'd resist rational decision-making. I just think pollards would be a better use of money than bounties to try to effect change in this population's habits. Maybe my assumptions are wrong, though, and it's a huge number of offenders making what feel like small infractions, in which case more consistent enforcement would probably do quite a bit. I'd rather have police do the policing though (in theory).
Thanks for the link. It seems like those enumerated are all focused on 1. fraud perpetrated against the government and corruption, 2. large scale organizational crimes, and 3. environmental pollution. Those rewards exist to make up for reporting essentially torpedoing the whistleblower's career in at least the short term. Those are such a different kind of crime, and such different reasons for a lack of enforcement, that I'm unsure how they'd be indicative of probable outcomes from paying people to report other individual citizens for endangerment-scale infractions.
I'd categorize them more broadly as "crimes that have individual benefit and broader social costs", which illegal dumping and parking both qualify as.
As far as "police do the policing", are you against red light cameras as well? What about parking enforcement people who aren't cops? Social workers who aren't cops dealing with non-violent social issues? I don't personally like the idea of armed officers being the be all end all of law enforcement. Better to have different tools for different situations.
That net includes almost every crime, though, and the distinction I made is pretty significant. Illegal dumping by random civilians cleaning out their attics is probably not meaningfully being reported by whistleblowers, even with the bounties. The area they're hopefully effective in is curtailing business owners and their management from believing they can get away with it.
Red light cameras are in the same camp, absolutely. At least there it isn't relying on inherently inconsistent random civilians, but it is still a situation where unsafe city planning decisions and diffuse coordination problems are being used to enrich a select few private individuals acting as middlemen, hence further disincentivizing their interest in supporting reform that removes a line of income. Social workers, acting as law enforcement officers, are effectively police. The gun doesn't make the civic purpose, the authority and (theoretical) responsibility do.
I've heard the use of the word violence stretched pretty far, but being ticketed by mail for a traffic violation couldn't possibly meet any definition of it in my eyes. Someone causing an injury to a cyclist, or causing a death because of a blocked fire hydrant could.
It's an implication of violence. If it weren't, the fines would be voluntary. It strikes me as slightly more absurd to classify "illegally occupying space that is presumed to be open" as violence, even if it implies reckless endangerment.
It's not presumed to be open. There are almost always very clear markings on illegal parking places. To be fair, I don't think that illegally parking is violence in any way, but getting a fine for breaking the law definitely isn't.
Also, I don't even see how it implies violence. If you get a fine, you just have to pay some money. That's not violent. Even if you don't pay, you'll just incur interest, and eventually lose your license or have your vehicle's registration cancelled. No one is going to be sent to your house to beat you up or anything.
I'm on your side here, I don't think either is violence. That said, I see where the other poster is coming from, because ultimately, if you refuse to pay an accumulating fine and the state shows up to take your car, any resistance on your part will ultimately be met by some sort of physical enforcement - whether you being restrained or forcibly removed from the scene. Ultimately, anything the state enforces is enforced by its (theoretical) monopoly on violence, right?
The violent act would be the enforcement of resisting someone executing a legal order in the service of public safety then though, no?
If someone parks their care in my driveway, ask them to move it, that act isn't violent, or even implying violence, despite the fact that if they continually refuse, I'll call a tow truck to eventually remove the car. Only if the person who owns that car tries to use violence to stop that from happening will violence be returned. It's not the act of me calling the tow truck that made the situation violent. It's the choice of the person who owned that car to use violence that did.
If the standard for "implying violence" means any action that could conceivably result in violence no matter who initiates it, then literally every choice someone makes on a day to day basis implies violence. Kids going to school imply violence because school shootings happen. Working in a mine implies violence because another country might invade yours for those resources and so on.
A situation that could result in violence is not the same as a threat of imprisonment backing a fine. This is not ambiguous or even a controversial idea. These arguments aren't even good sophistry.
Governments monopolize violence. By the way you frame it, my argument would be "the army exists, so living is implied violence". What I said was limited to the issuance of punishment for a legal violation. Which specifically rests on the exercise of that monopoly, rather than coincidentally happening near it. Please stop with the bad faith argumentation.
There's no threat of imprisonment. We don't do debtors prisons anymore. There's no situation by which failing to pay a parking fine will result in you being imprisoned. Your fine will go to collections, your driver's license may be suspended, your car's registration will be cancelled, and your car may even be impounded, but no one is sending you to prison for being illegally parked.
This isn't a bad faith argument, you're just very, very much stretching the concept of violence to include things like losing property or privileges.
It's a contempt of court charge in the US, where "we don't have debtors prisons anymore". I have no clue about Swedish law, but I would be surprised if they didn't have analogous outcomes.
How does impounding work? If someone tried to flee the punishment before the tow truck arrived, or tried to (even nonviolently) prevent a tow truck from hitching the car, or hid it to prevent impounding, what would be the legal result? In most jurisdictions, to my knowledge, at the end of these nonviolent avoidances of payment lies some form of unambiguous violence.
Wrongful parking is not a crime, it's a civil matter with a fine. It cannot on its own lead to your license being revoked or to jail time, there would have to be another charge such as reckless behaviour.
Not paying the fine is not a crime, but comes with additional costs. If you are unable or unwilling to pay, eventually the debt will be sent to Kronofogden. It's the Swedish government agency tasked with debt collection, among other things. They may collect on your debt by for instance seizing cash, money in your bank accounts, stocks, tax returns, or your salary. Seizing other property is mostly within their rights but as far as I know it's a last resort, and even then there are some restrictions on what they may seize.
The courts are not involved unless you first contest the fine with the police, they reject it, you then apply for an appeal, and then the courts approve the appeal.
Yes, if you then go ahead and disrupt the courts proceedings in a sufficiently significant fashion, you can get sentenced to another fine or up to 6 months in jail, but that is an entirely separate offense which would not be applicable if you just refused to pay the fine.
Thanks, I appreciate the relevant context for the article!
It seems this app is based on photographic evidence which is then verified by parking attendants. I'm not sure what opportunities for making something up you envision.
I think you'll find that there is a subjective threshold of "have to" that varies greatly depending on the risk balance. I don't have to own a car or a bicycle in the first place, so certainly I only have to park at all in some abstract sense.
In my view there is a good reason traffic regulations don't make exceptions for things like "just a minute" or "just this once". Rules like this have to be considered through the lense of the categorical imperative. What would the effects of universally allowing blocking a bike path for "just a minute" be? If anyone was entitled to "just a minute" of your time, your life would absolutely suck. In my own experience, an awful day is more often than not built out of mild inconveniences.
That's, to some small degree, the situation where I live. Enough people put on their hazards anywhere and do whatever for just a minute, only because the risk that someone that can enforce the law will see and attend to your infraction, that it becomes a ubiquitous inconvenience.
The result is less predictable traffic situation because it snowballs into congestion and people having to break the law in the sense hinted at above. That's much worse than someone feeling "alienated" for not being able to trust everyone they've inconvenienced by breaking the law not to report them.
Here you use the term "secret police force" as though being able to report infractions makes you part of a secret police force. Am I similarly part of a secret police force if I overhear a violent domestic fight in my neighbor's apartment and report it? There clearly isn't a categorical reason such a thing should be more harmful to the social fabric than breaking the law, so I assume you consider it a matter of degree. In that case I feel like comparing the effects of reporting traffic infractions to the effects of secret police forces in totalitarian states is more than a little disingenuous.
Because I'm tired of repeating myself: the issue is the bounty, not the laws around parking. Those were examples of where the reporting would be both unlikely to disincentivize the infraction as well as lead to a reduced sense of responsibility for the fine compared to the generic decontextualized "wrongdoer".
Are they being employed, invisibly from all outward appearance, to inform on legal infractions against their neighbors? Because that is very much like secret policing.
So instilling that same sense of alienation and mistrust is not an issue, so long as people aren't getting paid for it. Or is it that someone gets paid for it that creates the alienation in itself? I don't think I understand your point correctly, because these feel like unfavorable interpretations on my part, but I'm honestly not sure what else you are getting at.
The action remains the same regardless of whether I am getting paid for it or not, so I don't see how the effects of the action on society as a whole should be different. I report a crime; society, insofar that its laws are good, is better for it and the perpetrator will rightly feel somewhat alienated from society for being reminded that their behavior is not socially acceptable, regardless of my compensation. Then, to me, it seems like you're making more of a semantic argument than something that makes a material difference to the practical reality. You could call it "secret police force" per some relaxed definition of "police" but it's really not at all like a secret police force in a totalitarian state.
And to get back to the point made above, is it the compensation that is the issue in a totalitarian state as well? Is it right for me to report your thought crime so long as I don't get paid for it?
The compensation gives people a reason to go along with whatever the bounty is for, therefore disincentivizing a) real reform of the sources of problems, and b) people from pushing against new bounties, as the profit motive gives people plenty of justification to compromise their morals. These things are culturally addictive, just look at another case of bribing the citizenry to vote against their own long term interests: the USA's use of prisons and the staffing needed to run them to "stimulate" locally stagnant economies.
The compensation is how totalitarianism justifies itself.
If the bounty is for traffic infractions and traffic infractions are bad, that people go along with whatever the bounty is for is a good thing. More people should go along with the idea that traffic infractions are a bad thing.
I see, so to consider it as a potential source of some kind of perverse incentive. In the same sense that someone being compensated for performing surgery may be disincentivized to propose medical solutions that don't involve surgery, except largely inconsequential by comparison.
Evidently there are prison systems in the world that aren't massive private, industrial ventures where workers still get paid to work. So maybe it wasn't the boon of employment opportunities that created the weird prison industrial complex of the US. Moral compromise happens on all levels, but I don't think people in an affluent, christian society decide on their own that a stolen jacket should earn someone life without parole just because they want a job. The consent for the conditions in prisons and the legal system that destroys people has been deliberately manufactured by an industry that is too big to be anything but amoral in its strategy. It's not the result of activism from a grass roots movement of potential prison employees.
The phenomenon in the more general sense of economic incentives and disincentives is also a huge part in how any modern liberal democracy implements policy.
Personally I tend to agree that that kind of incentive can lead to misallocation of resources and rigid, counterproductive policy. In a more general sense I would agree that money as the governing force behind the allocation of resources is largely a mistake. Merely having a job is potential for moral compromise—time I spent working basically connecting one piece of software to another could have been spent on far better things from a utilitarian perspective, but I've made the choice to do this less useful thing out of the self-interest the economic system demands should guide my labor.
So yeah, I can get with the "money bad" argument if that's what you are ultimately saying, but if we accept the existing economic framework as a baseline, compensation for reporting traffic infractions doesn't strike me as particularly dangerous to the social fabric nor as a particularly likely source of perverse incentives.
Whether it's moral or not that I get compensated for my work seems to me to depend most of all on whether the work I get paid for is morally justifiable in itself. A surgeon that does very important and useful work has optimized the use of their time in a way that has a high moral "pay-off" regardless of the compensation they receive for the work. Sure, the compensation they receive for the work might create an incentive not to explore alternative medical solutions, but there's a baby in the bathwater that we shouldn't throw out only because of coulds.
I'm honestly trying to understand your argument here. I'm not being snarky. You're arguing that people would be encouraged not solve the core reason why people park blocking bike lanes because some people would profit from reporting it, and that reporting people blocking bike lanes if there's a financial reward for the reporting is a moral failure?
I would not go that far, simply because it's not productive. In a real sense, sure, but so is refusing to rock the boat when coworkers start suggesting a union, or continuing to vote for the Democrats or Republicans. Theoretically you could find a moral high ground to mock people from, but it's so costly as to be individually excusable. And that is a dangerous thing, to build systems that harm people for trying their best.
Otherwise, yes. Cleaning up the externalities of failures is a good way to keep the failing structures unexamined, especially in democracies where so much progress can only come from frustration with the status quo.
So then cleaning up the small difficulties keeps a lid on broader dissatisfaction with, in this instance, car-centric infrastructure, which keeps people from making bigger changes that would overall improve the situation? I can see that. I think that it's better to make small changes that head in the right direction rather than waiting for the cultural shifts to fully turn my way, but I can see it. Thank you, that makes sense.
Incrementalism, sure. Put bollards along bike lanes, tow people for offending repeatedly, employ more law enforcement tasked with identifying and peacefully resolving infractions. But not exchanging evils for convenience's sake, that's where I draw the line personally. It's not a dichotomy between "do nothing" and "fix problems". Just to clarify.
Ok, I understand. I'm still entirely unconvinced regarding that whole "evils" thing, though. But we're talking over that point in a different subthread, so I don't feel the need to reiterate it here.
Isn't parking in a way that endangers or inconveniences others already alienating themselves from their community? Either I recognize your car and know who you area and what you've done and our relationship is damaged by that, or I don't know who you are and we have no relationship to damage. If you just mean a broader, non-specific feeling of trust that your community will take care of you, well, the trust that they'll take care of you specifically by allowing you to park wherever you want is exactly what we'd like to undermine. They've already decided that their convenience is more important than the function of their community. They're taking steps to alienate themselves.
Because I'm tired of repeating myself: the issue is the bounty, not the laws around parking. Those were examples of where the reporting would be both unlikely to disincentivize the infraction as well as lead to a reduced sense of responsibility for the fine compared to the generic decontextualized "wrongdoer".
I don't understand why you believe the bounty would have that affect.
It fuels a culture of paranoia and implicit consent to secrecy in policing. On a very small scale in this case, but it's hazardous to spread around the responsibility of law enforcement in a system that still privileges the trained officials.
It's not "fueling a culture of paranoia" if it makes people be concerned they're going to be punished for committing an actual crime that they're choosing to commit in public. Do parking tickets fuel a culture of paranoia? What about fines for littering?
It is if the means of enforcement rely on untrained random citizens arbitrarily assuming the duty to report "the bad thing" for a bounty. That's the paranoia, not in thinking "hey, this is a bad place to park, I might even get fined".
I'm sorry, I don't see it. Untrained random citizens report crimes all the time. That's generally how that works. And in the situations where there are rewards for information that leads to the conviction of a criminal, that report is reviewed and followed up upon by law enforcement. What is there to be afraid of here? There are certainly more ambiguous crimes where I would be far more concerned about citizen reporting. But traffic crimes are generally pretty unambiguous. Their car was where it wasn't supposed to be, or moving in a way it shouldn't. If someone is worried about being fined for that, it's not the hardest thing in the world to follow the traffic laws.
Like I said, I'm not terribly worried about Sweden going full-tilt police state as a result of this. Other places, with more developed apparatuses of oppression? More so.
Note that my first comment here was a response to yours, and the attitude of shutting down conversation with emphasis on the personal danger and frustration you experience due to these infractions, while also saying you'd settle for easy reporting without the bounty. "We have to do something, why don't you take my pain seriously?" inhibits honest discourse about solving problems because it privileges any action, fueled by spite, that purports to improve things, even if it'd cause negative externalities that might (not, in this case) outweigh the benefits, regardless of the reality of the problems that victimize those being pandered to.
I'm not "shutting down the conversation because of my pain." I was here continuing the conversation with you. While I did start this thread by showing the ways in which I have personally experienced this issue and pointed out the ways that what seems like a minor inconvenience on the part of the lawbreaker is actually a significant health and safety risk, I haven't been arguing that people should "take my pain seriously." I've been happy to debate the issue on its facts, but not when you're trying to say that I'm too emotional about it. Heck yes I have emotions about it, I've been nearly hit by a car in this exact situation. But I haven't been arguing based on that experience, but on theories of distributed law enforcement and incentive structures. For you to turn it around and cast aspersions that I'm just "asking people to take my pain seriously" is a cheap shot, and one that I'm not interested in taking. I'm done with this. You have a good day now.
I meant to say that your approach to conveying your initial position had that effect, not that you were whining and trying to shut down conversation. I'm sorry for implying otherwise. Your first comment and immediate responses were of a significantly different tone than the following conversation, which were much more centered on your personal investment than the more productive exchange after the fact.
I'm not casting aspersions, I'm saying this, right here, is how division gets fostered. Real people have real pain, and sometimes that limits their perspective, just like people who haven't experienced it are usually unaware of the problems. And other people are afraid of communicating those limitations. And so only the least-competent communicators, since they're used to being told to fuck off, are willing to voice criticisms. And so their criticisms are automatically discredited, and so on.
And so have I. I haven't brought it up before because, obviously, it comes across as saying "well I'm not mad, why are you mad?" But just because I'm not upset doesn't mean I'm not qualified to have an opinion, and your first comments felt like they were closing off meaningful discussion. Your response was as reasonable as anyone's, and normal, and justified. I hope you can at least believe me when I say I didn't mean to accuse you of any moral failing or disingenuous tactics.
I still don't understand why that's paranoia. The "untrained random citizens arbitrarily assuming the duty to report "the bad thing" for a bounty." just means you're more likely to get caught doing the thing you already know you shouldn't be doing. Is it that you're more likely to be reported for something that may not actually be illegal? In that case the more trained police officers would have to be the ones that move forward with issuing consequences anyway. Any problems there would be a result of poor police training, not of the incentive program.
I still don't understand how that comes from the incentive rather than from the ability to report at all. What is the secrecy if it's common knowledge that everyone has access to the app? How is it paranoia to know that there are likely to be appropriate consequences for your actions? Because you can't trust your neighbors to cover for you when you do a thing that causes problems for them? That seems like common sense, not paranoia.
Why, in this specific case? They aren't doing any of the parts that actually require training. They aren't interacting with the people doing the bad parking, they're just taking pictures. Yes, other individuals with more responsibility will have more training. That's how it should work. Having every police office constantly ready for the worst case scenario violent encounter is how it's done in America, and that's a huge problem.
Also it would be the case whether there was an incentive or not. It would still be untrained people reporting their neighbors to a trained police force.
I'm torn, I do call out campus police/parking dept (depends on the hours) to handle people parked in the ♿ accessible spots without a pass or if the spots I'm allowed to park in are full (they're reserved and shouldn't be used by students). It's nearly always people "just gone for a minute" and it's really frustrating when I can't park the wheelchair van, or almost worse, can park it but can't drop the ramp because someone is double parked in the hashmarks.
And to an extent I just wish people would follow the rules. But I don't really need to narc on a person. Maybe a way to just have parking enforcement come check out an area?
I live in a very car centered city in germany.
There are so many people parking like complete assholes. For example they park so far on the sidewalk that you are not able to use the sidewalk properly: if you have a babystroller or a wheelchair you do not have the space to pass the car and are forced to walk on the street.
There is currently no proper way to make the police enforce good parking.
I would remove the monetary incentive for "snitching" to prevent abuse, but keep the possibility of contacting the authorities to improve the safety for pedestrians.
yeah I've definitely had some situations where I'd welcome an app to contact the Ordnungsamt just to give timely notice of something egregious. Like when a guy double-parked on the sidewalk. I took a picture of his car but had no idea who to tell about it other than ranting to my wife about it.
yeah, this just seems like a way to bring in revenue rather than improve public safety. reduce labor/time spent looking for infractions, increase volume of fines. while parking violations are irritating to other members of a community, most people aren't doing it in fire lanes where it poses an actual threat.
i can't imagine what this would be like in the us. we already have people who call the cops for every possible thing, and SWATing. i wonder what their plan is to prevent false reports and spam
New york city tried passing a similar bill a couple of years ago. As far as I saw, most people were pretty positive on it. Being stranded because someone illegally double parked, having your garbage not picked up because someone is blocking the spot for a garbage truck to pull up into, or losing an apartment or even worse, a loved one because fire apparatus can't get close enough to a building are all annoying to horrifying. I think people should be scared to park illegally.
i don't have an issue with ticketing for parking that is a safety risk or causes other real harm; i don't know what they're dealing with in sweden but i think the situation in new york is such a unique combination of factors that it doesn't make sense to me to compare them. in my experience (portland, houston, dallas) the much more common violation is just not paying/meter running out, parking during the wrong hours, or parking in someone else's space. like i care much less about someone parking without paying than someone parking next to a fire hydrant or in a handicap space.
Agreed on some level, I think parking fines should definitely be much higher if there's a safety risk. I don't think that they shouldn't exist for things like letting a meter run out though. If there's no penalty for not paying for parking, then why pay for parking?
It's honestly a little scary to me how positive the other comments here are about this. The headline alone set off alarm bells in my head for similar reasons that you said.
Often when a car is parked, the person responsible for the car isn't in it, and it's often not clear when they'll be back. It doesn't make sense to wait for potentially hours so that you can explain to a person that their actions were wrong, when they almost certainly already knew and don't care.
That said, in the American system, getting the cops involved for any reason should be taken extremely seriously and only done if lives are already on the line. The danger they bring to any situation is not worth the resources they have access to. Swedish police are very different and much less dangerous to the populace. The resources the police have to find the owner of a vehicle without waiting around for them are worth involving them here, because they aren't going to respond with firearms and expecting danger.
In general I agree, but I would absolutely snitch on cars parked in handicap spots with no placards.
Honestly, we need a lot more of this. I'm living in a more bike-friendly area now. I used to live in a larger more bike-intolerant city in the US South. I would ride in accordance with local laws. However, biking was a constant exercise dealing with the repeated illegal violation and harassment on the part of local drivers. I might be biking on a street in a no-passing zone with no shoulder. People would try to illegally pass, or aggressively honk and yell at you for biking legally. Some would even try to run you off the road.
The police generally do not respect cyclists. Even killing a bicyclist will rarely result in so much as a ticket. What is needed to police aggressive drivers and abuse against cyclists is a system that bypasses the police all together. One possibility is to establish a private cause of action against aggressive drivers endangering cyclists. For example, there was, I believe, a four-foot minimum passing distance required. Cars would violate that all the time, zooming by with short separations. We could make it so a bicyclist so endangered could drag every single driver who does this to them into small-claims court. Cameras are cheap now. You can wear a camera on your ride, and even have it back up automatically to the cloud. Driver passes you at an unsafe distance? You should be able to sue them for $200. A driver repeatedly honks or tailgates at you, while you are riding the safest you can in accordance with the law? $1000 right of private action. A driver tries to force you off the road? You now own their car.
We could use the same thing with parking in bicycle lanes. Are you riding along and a car is illegally blocking your path? You should be able to take several pictures of it, record the date and time, make a quick video, and then sue them in court. Any random person impeded by an illegally parked vehicle should be able to sue the owner of that vehicle. A similar thing would do wonders for pedestrian safety.
At least in the US, police largely view pedestrians and bicyclists as subhuman creatures not really worthy of legal protection. If we really want to combat the surge of pedestrian and cyclist deaths, we need enforcement mechanisms that bypass police and their biases all together. Drivers who recklessly endanger cyclists and pedestrians will quickly find themselves joining the ranks of bicyclists and pedestrians as their cars are sued out from under them.
In areas where they put up actual barriers between cars and bike lanes, this isn't a problem. It's not cheap, but neither is stopping traffic because of an accident.
It also cuts down on the bicycle lane as a danger when people don't look before they open their doors.
They do help a good bit, as do setups where the cycle path is between the parking spaces and the sidewalk rather than between the traffic lanes and the parking.
I can see people going around in their spare time to find cars to report for some extra side income.