The robot cops we needed

Have you ever parked without paying the meter? Have you paid but gone over the time by a few minutes?  What was the reason? Maybe you stopped in front of a meter to run and drop something in the mailbox across the street. Maybe you left the car somewhere for a brief moment to pick up a friend. Maybe you were stuck in a meeting a few minutes longer than you expected.   Sometimes, if you are unlucky that day, the attendant will happen by at exactly the wrong moment and you end up with a ticket. But on most days you get away with it.  Does that seem fair to you?  Most of us would probably say so.

After all, the purpose of metered parking is to dis-incentivize the hoarding of a scarce resource. In highly trafficked areas, such as an urban commercial corridor, there are often too many cars and too little space to put them all at once.  In order to keep things moving, we make it expensive for any one vehicle to occupy a space indefinitely. A parking fine is like a library fine in that its primary function is to encourage people to share a scarce resource. If you've parked your car at a meter for a minute or two without paying, or if you've gone over the limit a smidge, you really aren't violating the spirit of the law.  Technically you can still be ticketed.  But it's probably fair that you aren't always ticketed.

Of course some people have a different understanding of what the law is for.  Certain city officials, for example Ramsey Green and Jay Banks here, want to use it to punish bicyclists for violating traffic laws originally written to apply to motor vehicles. It's difficult to know how much of that comes from the ever-expanding quest for new ways of shaking money out of people vs how much of it is just general hostility.

There's less confusion over what motivates  LaToya Cantrell's decision to fiddle with the school zone cameras.  Emails and memos uncovered by the Daily Georges show that the primary motivation was to grab as much revenue from unsuspecting motorists as possible. The hostility came as a bonus reaction from the mayor once people started to notice.  

Digging in her heels despite public uproar, Mayor LaToya Cantrell this week defended her surprise move to reduce the speeds that prompt traffic camera tickets in New Orleans, saying her goal was to increase safety.  In a 30-minute interview with her own staffers posted online late Wednesday, the mayor said that dropping the allowable speed for cameras in school zones and elsewhere was a way to protect children. She didn't address why drivers weren't told about the change beforehand.

That article does an okay job of relaying the mayor's comments. But you really have to watch the video to get the full experience of her bullying belligerent style. The main thrust of her message that day was New Orleanians are a bunch of slackers and she is not going to tolerate that anymore.

Letting people take a laissez-faire approach to following the rules often leads to larger problems, she added.

"We have to shake this image of being 'the Big Easy' where you can do whatever you want to in the city of New Orleans," Cantrell said.

This isn't the first time a mayor has lectured us about our insufficiently submissive attitude toward the rules. Mitch Landrieu once argued that we should close all the bars in town at 3 because our "culture of permissiveness" was what was causing all the murders. Our mayors love to tell us our problems can be traced to some inherent character flaw. It's almost as if there's something in their culture of authority that drives them to this. Whatever it is, LaToya has certainly taken to it well.

If a motorist enters a school zone and happens to slow down to 25 mph instead of 24 before the camera tags them, well "that's illegal!" Cantrell shrieks in the video. "We can't pick and choose" how we handle something like that. "Cyclists will be ticketed!" she says, pounding the table. Discretionary enforcement in order to uphold the spirit of the law while accounting for the human elements that might lead to its technical violation from time to time has no place here.

Which brings us back to the parking meters. This week we learned they are getting "more efficient."

NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans is testing out a high-tech system to write parking tickets, without you ever seeing a parking enforcement officer. Placed at two different spots downtown, new meters monitoring parking electronically are currently gathering information the city will study.

"There's always room for improvement on trying to make things more efficient," Deputy Director of Operations Josh Hartley said. "We're looking at the vehicle types that park here, looking at the violations that come in, how long people are actually parking here."

So how does it work? After you park your car, you find your spot number and put your money in the meter. If your time runs out, a sensor in the spot will tell a camera nearby to take a picture of your plate and you could get a ticket.

"There's potential with this technology that if there's a violation activated, this system could automatically generate a ticket," Hartley said. "Versus having staff actually have to come walk to this site and issue a paper ticket you'd normally see on a windshield."

The meters are expected to make enforcement easier by adding extra lenses, instead of eyes, to the street.

"We are wanting to make things more efficient," he said. "This does not eliminate jobs, what it actually does is it would allow us to utilize our resources better in other parts of the city that we normally are not monitoring."

Well at least it does not eliminate jobs. We like that.



It's this "holding people accountable for their parking" bit that is concerning.  For all of the reasons stated above, it seems to us we're already doing that well enough without adding robots. But, hey, it's a free trial offer so...  

And if all goes well, installation around town could be put into drive, holding people accountable for their parking. The trial is free for the city, it's unclear how much the system would cost if implemented. It's already being used in other cities in the United States.  If the city of New Orleans moves forward with the meters, it's expected they'll first be put into the busy parts of downtown and then into other areas.

Speaking of which, how did the free trial come about? According to a press release this week, the vendor is something called Municipal Parking Services Inc.  The product is called a "Sentry SafetyStick" As the WWLTV article says, it is being used in other cities.  Here is a story from Bridgeport, CT where they were removed last year because people were already tired of being "threatened" by them.

As previously reported, a year after installing the high-tech meters, Mayor Joe Ganim’s administration has cried “uncle” in response to complaints the equipment was too aggressive and hard to operate, poorly publicized, and hurting the local economy.

The meters will be replaced with a different model that offers the same conveniences — like accepting credit cards — without the cameras that caught violations and helped to issue tickets-by-mail.

Ricci and Nkwo on Thursday offered members of the council’s contracts committee additional details about the overhaul.

Ricci said the existing meters, built and installed by Municipal Parking Services out of Minnesota, will be replaced with less “threatening” ones supplied by IPS Group of California and already in use in other municipalities.

As usual, though, New Orleans is jumping on board with a scheme that's already failed elsewhere and calling it a "best practice."  Where do they get these ideas?  Well here is one possibility. About a month ago the mayor attended the US Conference of Mayors get together in Hawaii. There was some grousing on talk radio about that but mayors go to these things all the time.  Mitch was actually the President of the USCM for a time.

Basically, it's a trade show.  The mayors get together and congratulate one another on the fantastic and visionary jobs they are all doing. And, of course, there is ample opportunity for them to receive further flattery from potential "corporate partners" who are there to sell them things. Sponsors and presenters at this year's conference include Verizon, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, AT&T, Interise, Google, Facebook, and our very favorite friend of urban policymakers everywhere, Airbnb. I didn't find Municipal Parking Solutions on the agenda, but it's a fair bet they had a rep or two in the room at one or another discussion on "Smart Cities" or "Intelligent Transit Solutions" and whatnot.

Not that this mayor needs much convincing that her citizens and their "Big Easy" attitudes need to be watched more carefully.  But it's nice to know the market may have provided just the robot cop product she needed.