Watchdog Says Australia's Traffic Enforcement System Has Hits Hundreds Of Drivers With Bogus Fines

from the move-fast-and-break-things:-hefty-bureaucracy-edition dept

In Australia, the government has automated traffic enforcement, letting the machines do the work. It's also automated the limited due process procedures, giving aggrieved citizens the chance to have their complaints and challenges ignored at scale, as The Newspaper reports.

At least 397 motorists in Victoria, Australia, lost their right to drive because the state government bungled the handling of speed camera fines. In a report released Wednesday, Victoria Ombudsman Deborah Glass blasted Fines Victoria, the agency responsible for overseeing the handling of citations. The report reviewed 605 complaints from members of the public about how this year-old state agency handled their situations.

"Many complaints were about delay in the processing of nominations, completing reviews and implementing payment plans," Glass said in a statement. "The impact of these issues should not be underestimated. People had their licenses wrongly suspended, or were treated as liable for substantial fines, when they had committed no offense."

Automating the back end and the front end results in this sort of thing -- just one of several personal anecdotes the Ombudsman collected from angry Australians forced to deal with the user-unfriendly system. From the report [PDF]:

Dan contacted the Ombudsman about infringements incurred by his late son who had died in tragic circumstances. Dan said he made multiple attempts to call Fines Victoria, but on each occasion the phone went to an automated service, or he was on hold for a long time.

Dan also said he had sent through multiple complaints online but had not received a response. We contacted Fines Victoria, providing a copy of the Coroner’s ‘confirmation of death certificate’ for Dan’s son. We followed up several times after receiving no response. Fines Victoria said later they had not received the email from us.

Dan received further enforcement letters which he said was extremely stressful and upsetting. He became increasingly concerned the Sheriff would go to his son’s home which he had shared with housemates.

Fines Victoria put all 27 outstanding matters, totalling $7,636.60, on hold pending their withdrawal. The enquiry process, however, went for close to 40 days. This is despite Dan providing all relevant information to Fines Victoria a number of times before contacting us.

That's one of the possible outcomes of Fines Victoria mishandling its end of the complaint process: law enforcement showing up to seize property and auction it off to pay fines. All of this is set in motion automatically via date triggers. From the report, it appears Australian citizens can spend every day of their challenge periods on hold without ever reaching anyone who could help them with a resolution.

Even the lucky few who manage to speak to a live person aren't going to receive much help. The multiple failures detailed in the report received responses from Fines Victoria ranging from "not our fault" to "we'll try not to screw so many people over in the future."

One citizen sums up the Fines Victoria experience succinctly:

When we make a mistake, we pay. When they make a mistake, we pay.

Some of this could have been prevented if Fines Victoria had used all of its allotted time to ensure proper functionality before bringing the system online. Instead, the government decided to rush implementation, leading to a spectacular run of failures that stripped people of their licenses, hit them with bogus fees, and otherwise made their lives miserable.

On 31 December 2017, Fines Victoria began operation with only partial IT functionality. Problems with IT functionality, and related procedural and processing issues, have been apparent since the inception of the agency…

It was not clear why, with a default commencement date of 31 May 2018, the decision was taken to commence earlier than this on 31 December 2017. This decision was perplexing considering Fines Victoria was reporting that significant IT challenges were affecting its operation from the time it commenced.

This rush job led directly to Australians being punished by a system that was much, much worse than the one it replaced.

Complaints received about Fines Victoria in 2018 represented a 74 per cent increase from the number of complaints received the previous year about Civic Compliance Victoria.

All the new system added was "significant IT challenges," significant hold times, and a much lower chance of having problems resolved.

In addition to the rise in the number of complaints, Ombudsman staff observed a change in the nature of the complaints. People were expressing frustration about delays and being unable to make contact with Fines Victoria much more frequently than with the predecessor agency. There was also an increase in complexity about the administration of infringements which meant many complaints could not be resolved through a quick series of enquiries.

It's not just the software. It's also the people. The Ombudsman notes that the problems in the system were made worse by the government employees fielding complaints, who often seemed to go out of their way to push problems back on drivers.

Enforcement at this scale isn't possible without at least some automation. But the government's botched implementation shows it cared more about maximizing revenue than minimizing error. And when everything goes this wrong this quickly, it's the citizens who end up paying for both the end results of a broken system and the costs involved in fixing it.

Filed Under: australia, automated traffic enforcement, fines, mistakes, traffic enforcement, victoria

Driverless Cars: Disrupting Government Reliance On Petty Traffic Enforcement

from the uber-but-for-killing-your-small-town-speed-trap dept

Self-driving cars are on the way, and in their wake, they'll leave a variety of entities slightly less better off. Insurance companies may be the first to feel the pinch, as less-than-risk-averse drivers are replaced with Electric Grandmothers more than willing to maintain safe speed limits and the proper distance between vehicles. And as goes the car accident, so go other areas of the private sector: personal injury/DUI lawyers, hospitals, body shops, red light camera manufacturers, towing companies, etc.

But the public sector will take the hit as well. "Flow my tears," said the policeman.

Consider the following. This past year, the City of Los Angeles generated $161 million from parking violations. Red light violations have a fee of $490. Californians caught driving under the influence are fined up to $15,649 for a first-offense misdemeanor DUI conviction and up to $22,492 for an under-21 equivalent. Cities in California collect, on average, $40 million annually in towing fees that they divide with towing firms. Simply put, the hundreds of millions of dollars generated from poor driving-related behaviors provide significant funding for transportation infrastructure and maintenance, public schools, judicial salaries, domestic violence advocacy, conservation, and many other public services.

Since California legalized driverless vehicles, Google has logged more than 1.7 million miles during the testing phase and been involved in 11 accidents, none of which were the fault of the driverless vehicle. Tesla, Mercedes, and others are not far behind. It turns out that automated vehicle technology—unlike humans—abides by the law. And that’s bad news for local government revenues. In other words, once driverless cars become mainstream, deep revenue sources acquired from driving-related violations such as speeding tickets and DUIs will decrease greatly.

Someone has to pay for the roads and other government activities, but it won't be drivers. So, as the Brookings Institution report points out, new revenue streams will have to be sought. The obvious suggestion is tax-per-mile billing, but that puts the government right in your vehicle -- an idea that's not going to gain in popularity any time soon.

While the loss of revenue will have an impact, the picture painted here is skewed. For many years, communities have treated police departments as revenue generators, rather than crime fighters. This has skewed incentives so badly that some small towns have become nothing more than profitable speed traps. That's one end of the issue: the pressure (or the willingness) to overpolice minor traffic violations to keep city governments (and the police departments themselves) funded.

But that's only part of it. The situation looks rather dire, especially if one doesn't examine what's not being said in these paragraphs. As Scott Shackford at Reason points out, the Brookings Institution report does some mighty fine cherry-picking for its list of potentially-affected government services. Without a doubt, a downturn in revenue will affect good government programs like public schools and domestic violence programs. But it will also cut back funding for far more dubious government spending.

What an interesting list of government-financed uses they've chosen. Notice they left off "Poorly made third-party database software that will stop working properly in less than three years and that was purchased from somebody belonging to the same frat as the assistant city manager," "police abuse settlements," and "blatant pension spiking."

These "losses" will also be somewhat offset by less tax revenue being spent on traffic enforcement, accident response units and other related law enforcement activities. This will also mean fewer law enforcement officers will need to be employed, which should further reduce government expeditures.

The problem is that most governments aren't capable of heading off this sort of "threat" to their livelihoods, even with years of advance notice. Trimming back unneeded public sector employees won't happen until years after it's obvious they're no longer needed and will often come accompanied with expensive severance packages. New tax revenue streams won't be explored until they can be put off no longer, and often will just be added on top of existing taxes, rather than replacing those that have slowed to a trickle.

Worse, those most affected by this sort of shift will be the same people most affected by most government tax increases: the poor. The lowest income brackets will be the last to adopt driverless vehicles, leaving them the most exposed to fines for traffic violations (fines that will likely increase as revenue dwindles), as well as new costs like per-mile taxation. They're also most likely to see support programs they rely on suffer cuts as traffic enforcement money dries up.

The report somewhat addresses this outcome with a discussion of income inequality and the "disappearance of the middle class." While some of it is accurate and some of it is mostly buzzwords in search of a point, there's no doubt that traffic enforcement revenue will mostly be collected from those who can least afford it. After all, governments have done this for years -- something that helped fuel the outrage and backlash in Ferguson after the shooting of Michael Brown.

Is Brookings actually trying to blame the gap between billionaires and the poor for the racial tension in Ferguson? Which venture capitalist was it who told the Ferguson police to step up fine collection to rake in more money for the city's coffers? Which hedge fund manager invented the bureaucratic court system in Ferguson and other St. Louis County cities designed to wring every last cent from any indigent minority who couldn't afford an attorney? Which Wall Street "fat cat" is adding additional fees to every little fine so that getting pulled over for something as simple as not signaling a turn could end up costing hundreds of dollars for somebody who could end up losing his license and his ability to even work?

While driverless cars hold a great deal of disruption potential, when it's all said and done, governments will remain largely undisrupted. Whatever changes are made in response will arrive well after they're needed and be badly implemented. The same people who suffered in the previous system will find no improvement in the next one. While one would hope the drastic reduction in traffic enforcement would result in better, smarter policing more focused on serious criminal activity, old habits die hard. Cops will just go where the driverless car ain't, rather than trim that area of law enforcement to the minimum required. And cities will cut programs deemed expendable, rather than subject their own spending habits to greater scrutiny.

Filed Under: autonomous vehicles, driverless cars, taxes, traffic enforcement, traffic fines