confusion

While waiting near the Lavender MRT stop the other day I stumbled upon this site. This pile of cigarette butts at the base of this tree, just next to the sidewalk is the anonymous public’s way of declaring their desire for a ashtray/trashcan to be near-at-hand. There were actually several of these piles around the tree and at the edge of a small fence nearby.

Putting aside the fact that I think cigarettes ought to be slapped with a punitive littering tax, I can’t think of anything that so many people willfully litter about, let’s consider this pile of butts a cry for help from our anonymous smokers. From this spot the nearest ashtray/trash can is about 30 meters away at the MRT entrance. You can’t smoke at MRT entrances—or most other public places, good on Singapore for that. So the smokers have to walk away some distance to have their fix. Of course the logical place to up the ashtray/trash cans was at the MRT entrance. Very convenient for anyone who wants to toss a food wrapper (you can’t eat or drink in the MRT) or a advertisement (there are always a dozen people handing out spam at the Lavender MRT…) but this is now a very inconvenient place for the smokers banished to the tree line some distance away.

The pile of cigarette butts represents the smokers equivalent of a ‘desire line‘ [wikipedia.org]. The smokers want an ashtray/trash can here and the landlords or maintenance crew should put one here—or get the cops to come and ticket the smokers until they learn not the litter here, but that’s not a realistic solution, as much as I like to see people get ticketed.

I first learned about desire lines in a class on software design, in discussions about usability of software and interface design. The idea of desire lines originates from architecture and landscaping. Basically the idea is that no matter how beautiful your building or park, if you failed to provide a convenient way to get from point A to point B people are going to make a shortcut, even if that means walking through your wonderfully manicured flowerbeds. You can’t stop it, only try to anticipate it at design time. By asking yourself “how are users going to actually use my design,” you can mitigate how much damage they do by not following your prescribed paths. This might be done by placing the paths where the users will naturally want them—through the flowerbed—or by building obstacles to remove the temptation to take a shortcut (‘put a fish pond there’).

Of course you can’t predict everything before hand, so you have to study the desire lines that users create after the fact. Then you can improve the existing work and have a better understanding next time. In the case of Lavender MRT the fix for this little ‘desire marker’ is simple, put an additional ashtray/trashcan next to the tree.

I have an idea… on how to punish stupid drivers. Rather then have a billion cops on the road trying to police every lane change and tailgate we can learn a little bit from the power of the internet. We will use crowdsourcing to identify bad drivers.

Here’s how it works:

First we add four cameras to every car —just like the cameras some cars have now for reversing— we will have one with a clear view in front of the car, one looking behind and one on each side. These four cameras will be on whenever the engine is running and they will record what they see to a storage device somewhere in the brains of the car, part of a in-vehicle control unit. The storage device will contain, let’s say, enough memory to record the most recent five minutes of video from each camera. If it’s not used (as below) in the five minutes then the video is just dumped.

Second we need a trigger for the driver. This would be some sort of easy to use button or switch on the dash or maybe on the steering wheel. When the driver activates the trigger the in-vehicle control unit will preserve the record of what is going on around the car by copying the current recording to a separate ‘holding memory’. But rather than taking just the previous five minutes the in-vehicle control unit will delay for two minutes 30 seconds before the recording is transferred. This means that the unit will capture what was happening on all sides of the vehicle for the 2 and a half minutes before the trigger was pressed and for the 2 and a half minutes after the trigger was pressed.

Once a recording is transferred to the holding memory a process would begin to send this information to a central processing system. How exactly this would happen would be a big hurdle but let’s say, for the sake of brevity, that there is some sort of ubiquitous network built into the road system such that the in-vehicle control unit can send the recording via a WiFi connection. We could imagine some additional information, such as gps trackers coordinates and a simple time-stamp being sent along with the recording, but we should refrain from sending any sort of data about the vehicle submitting the recording, it needs to be anonymous.

At the central processing system the video would be processed by a software system to identify all the license plates visible in the videos and ‘tag’ the videos in such a way that the system is able to retrieve the portion of any video containing a specific license plate.

The central processing system would calculate if the same license plate was showing up in a large number of videos in a period of time. If a license is showing up with some pre-set frequency it would be flagged for review by a human. For example if a particular license plate shows up in 5 videos in a 20 minute time span the various relevant video potions would be collected and sent for review by a human.

The human’s job in all this would be watch the videos and determine if the driver who’s license plate was flagged was doing something illegal or dangerous. Where they tailgating? Changing lanes erratically? If so they would be issued a ticket for this. And the videos could be used as evidence in any dispute.

The crowd sourcing is important, I don’t want a system that records everything blindly. I want the drivers of cars to use the trigger to flag behavior that they think is bad. If someone cuts them off or is tailgating them then they can just use the trigger and know that, if the person is habitually doing something wrong or behaving dangerously, they will be punished because others will also be sending in video of the bad behavior.

To avoid overly cautious people or vindictive drivers from abusing the system there would be some sort of daily limit on incident submissions. For example, you can only send in five incidents a day. And by requiring that there be multiple videos, triggered by multiple drivers of bad behavior the system relies on the wisdom of the crowd to know what is dangerous and undesirable behavior —one person cannot get you in trouble, everyone has to agree you drive like a moron— while still having a human on the back end, and expert or maybe a committee of them, making the final determination of if this is actually illegal and the driver is going to be punished. And of course all of this only works if every car is equipped with the system.

Sound a little big brother? Too many privacy concerns? Well, don’t worry I can’t imagine this actually happening in places like the US (well, maybe the UK… ironic huh?) This system is really for Singapore. It’s a good fit for Singapore; a small enough place that you could have the ubiquitous network —imagine the amount of coverage you’d need to cover the US? Singapore is like Manhattan. It also works because the Singapore government has the power to force things like installing the system in all cars. In fact they’ve already done something similar by mandating the fitting of an in-car stored value card reader/transmitter for the ERP system [wikipedia.org]. And most importantly the police don’t actually enforce driving rules here. The result of which is that everyone, despite having to know the rules to pass a strict driver licensing scheme, drives like they got their license from a box of cracker-jacks.

This is a much better alternative to my original idea, which was to arm everyone with a gun shooting little Nerf like flags that said “moron” on them and having the police stop and ticket anyone with 6 or more of these flags stuck to their (moving) car. Everyone gets a daily ration of 5 flags. That way you can shoot the morons who piss you off.

I think we should take the titans of industry who’s companies have failed in the recent bowel movement of ‘unfettered capitalism’ and send them to places where 100% of people live on less than $1.00 a day. Leave them there with a camera crew to follow them around and give them $1.00 every day. I’m thinking bankers used to million dollar bonuses would make for good TV in this situation.