My app will be contesting that ticket (Image: CALLUM BENNETTS / MAVERICK)
IT WAS winter in California. , a software developer in San Francisco, was driving through one of the state’s national parks when he found that the road ahead had been closed for the rest of the season – because of snow.
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Except that California was and is in the middle of a drought, and there was no snow in sight. The road, Schoffstall figured, had been shut simply as a matter of routine.
“It really bugged me,” he says. He wondered whether he could fake public outrage around the issue, without wasting much money or time. “I started thinking about how I could automate making my voice heard.”
As a test, Schoffstall picked a smaller battle: light pollution at a park near his apartment. He used Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace to solicit fake complaints, offering 20 cents for each one received. The responses rolled in, some surprisingly specific, referencing local political history or relating personal tales of woe (see “Those lights ruined my romance“).
One of the responses criticised Schoffstall’s strategy: “Writing fictitious complaints to the government is never a good idea.” Undeterred, he sent a few of the other responses to the neighbourhood association and the city’s parks and recreation department. A few weeks later, the park lights had been fitted with guards to block upward beams.
With a little technological know-how, Schoffstall had found that he could amplify his own indignation. “The automation potential for this is shocking,” he says. “Look at corporate lobbying. You could bring that power into anyone’s hands.”
“With a little technological know-how, he could artificially amplify his own indignation”
That will alarm many, like the respondent who took Schoffstall to task. But automation need not involve seeking the backing of the masses.
In certain US cities, drivers who receive a parking ticket can snap a picture of it and upload it via the apps WinIt, Cited or Fixed. Software identifies information like the ticket ID, and scans the details for errors or cross-references them against other sources, such as the street labels on Google Maps. Then human experts look the case over and, if a defence can be made, contest the fine on the driver’s behalf.
The service saves people the time and hassle of trying to make sense of complicated parking regulations, says Christian Fama, one of WinIt’s founders. “People don’t know what the defences are. There’s nuanced stuff that, unless you’re an expert, you might not know to do,” he says.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, citizens irked by the many helicopters in local airspace have pushed for their complaints to be heard by the US Federal Aviation Administration. Enter the Automated Complaint System, which the FAA launched in April. People bothered by a specific helicopter can now call a hotline and answer a series of recorded questions, or go online and spot the copter on a live map. The system automatically records where each helicopter was spotted, which company was flying it and for how long.
David Garfinkle of the Los Angeles Helicopter Noise Coalition says that the system has made it easier and faster to register complaints – so far, it has collected about 6000 of them. Over time, it will help quantify the problem and highlight the noisiest offenders.
But as it gets easier for people to register their grievances, it may get harder for the authorities to process them, says , a professor at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder.
“Maybe those barriers were serving a societal purpose, making it hard enough that only people who really cared about an issue were able to complain,” he says. Traditionally, most people didn’t contest parking tickets. With the new software, it’s possible the authorities will be overwhelmed by a sudden influx of cases filed by proxies.
Digital judgements
Perhaps the solution is for dispute resolution itself to be partly automated. Auction site eBay and internet payment system PayPal rely on a San Jose company called Modria to handle most disputes between users. Modria’s platform collects details of the transaction, checks them against the rules in its system, and then spits out a judgement.
Such a model could also work for cases that tend to follow predictable patterns, such as disputes between landlords and tenants, says at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. “In these digital courts, it turns out there’s an 80/20 rule: 80 per cent of the disputes are pretty simple and easy to deal with,” he says. “Eventually, you make it to a human, but before that there’s a lot of stuff that can get resolved with little human involvement.”
It may be a long time before real-world courts come around to the idea. In the meantime, people like Schoffstall will continue to take their issues into their own hands.
“The end goal for me is to just get that road open,” he says. “If I could work my way up to that, I’d be pretty happy about it.”
Those lights ruined my romance
When Eric Schoffstall asked people on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to pen complaints about light pollution in a park, he had 20 responses in 2 hours. Workers spent an average of 5 minutes 25.5 seconds on each one – and they were nothing if not inventive:
• “I’ve already had to take two sick days off of work because I have been unable to rest properly at night due to this outrageous amount of light pollution.”
• “I heard one of my neighbours talking about taking the lights down himself! He is no electrician and could get himself hurt.”
• “My late-night romance has been ruined because of these bright lights!”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Don’t park your outrage”
