Ben Wellington's iQuantNY analyzes New York City open data on topics like parking tickets, taxis, restaurants, and the city budget.
HN commenters point to it as a good example of open data analysis and note that its findings led NYC to fix problems.
The assumption that parking tickets are usually avoidable and legitimate is understandable, but surprisingly far from true. The assumption that the legal system is overloaded as a single entity that's stressed by all new cases is also untrue.
One of the most ticketed spots in Chicago was a mind-bending mess of conflicting signage: it was a cab stand except when it was metered parking with a digital meter nowhere near the spot, which took money and issued city parking receipts for times when it didn't govern any legal parking spaces. Matt Chapman dug through ticket data to find this, asked the ward to clarify the signage, and annual ticketing there fell by half, saving $60,000 per year. Not exactly intentionally parking in handicapped spaces, is it? [1]
Of course, those were still legal tickets. The NYPD kicked things up a notch by simply failing to understand the city's parking laws. Parking in front of pedestrian curb cuts in NYC is legal if those cuts don't connect to crosswalks. Ben Wellington got a ticket for parking in one of those spots, and decided to see how many other people it had happened to. Rough estimate? Ten thousand illegal tickets per year, costing New Yorkers $1,700,000. And apparently an honest mistake - once Wellington raised it with the NYPD, they offered a reasonable explanation and promptly fixed the problem! [2]
Finally, these are not the sorts of cases which are overloading the legal system. Criminal charges in big cities consistently take more…
From Woodlawn you can take buses to 3 different subway trunk lines, with access to both the East Side and West Side, in addition to an Express Bus to Midtown East and the Metro-North to Grand Central. Those are pretty decent transit options. Unless you're fortunate enough to live in the closer-in areas of Queens or Brooklyn, or Manhattan itself, those also the only options for "most NYers". Aside from 24-hour subway access to the city, living within the city limits, as opposed to Westchester, also gives you the perk of being able to hail a yellow cab and get home for a reasonable rate instead of doing the livery cab thing.
See here for a map showing that ~20% (eyeballed) of Brooklyn by area is likely in the same boat as the people in Woodlawn.
http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/100729370274/found-the-brooklyn-residence-thats-farthest-from
That being said, I'm not quite sure that I believe that their definition of Woodlawn is completely accurate, nor do I believe that it's the cheapest neighborhood in the Bronx. If the 3D-bars on the map are to be believed, it looks like Woodlawn (the area immediately to the east of the green park (Van Cortlandt) in the north center of the Bronx) and Wakefield (east of Woodlawn) are lumped together. Adding to personal experience, this map [1] suggests a pretty big wealth disparity between Woodlawn and Wakefield, with a difference of ~$20k in median household income. The border between the two is generally taken to be the Bronx River…
I don't know what percentage of cars on New York City streets are cabs, or how many deaths are caused by taxis, but could a potential solution be to raise the slow-speed fare to incentivize drivers to slow down?
A cab driver makes $0.50 per 1/5 of a mile if going over 12 mph or $0.50 per minute if going under 12 mph. The average speed of a taxi hovers around 13 mph[1], but I bet most cab drivers think its higher, meaning they think they make more by getting to their destination quickly (e.g., if they think they average 15 mph, they think they're making $37.50/hour instead of $30 using the timed rate). Suppose the slow-fare rate was raised to $1-$2? Would that help reduce cab-involved accidents (at the expense of longer cab rides)?
Further, introducing traffic signal patterns with dedicated turning periods would help a lot. Without fail, I get dirty looks daily from drivers turning onto a street I'm crossing because I'm not scampering out of their way, despite having the right of way (even still, more pedestrians were killed in 2010 when crossing with the signal than against it[2]). I've been fortunate to never been hit, but it is a significant problem.
[1]: http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/93845043909/quantifying-the-best-and-worst-times-of-day-to-hit-the
[2]: http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-02-05/news/nyc-pedestrian-deaths/2/
Separate from the question of software liability is the court's responsibility to not make egregious errors.
Historically, courts have been unwilling to assign themselves blame for screwing up. Judicial immunity is untouchable in american case law because it's hard to find a judge willing to rule against it.
The standard of due process is high for 'life and limb' cases but low for misdemeanors & traffic violations. When Fixed discovered that most SF parking tickets are challengeable, SF didn't fix the problem -- they turned off their fax machine to make it harder to challenge tickets. https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/12/fixed-the-app-that-fixes-your-parking-tickets-gets-blocked-in-san-francisco-oakland-l-a/
NYC issued fake parking tickets to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/144197004989/the-nypd-was-systematically-ticketing-legally
Jurisprudence doesn't have a concept of 'bulk miscarriage of justice'. You could put NSA surveillance in this camp too. There's a star trek line about genocide which says 'we have no law to fit your crime'. That's where we are with petty crimes mishandled in bulk.
I think the quickest way to make the transition is to show skill in visualization. Data journalists share the same kind of analytic skills and processes as other kinds of data practitioners, but with an emphasis on publication and design. Visualization also happens to be the easiest way to reach and impress a large audience.
The other part of it is to demonstrate a good sense of the state of civic affairs. You can actually do quite well with average talent in programming and statistical skill...the bottleneck when it comes to data journalism is knowing the quality and quantity of data that is actually kept and produced by civic entities. Basically, being a good researcher will pay immense dividends...all of my best projects have literally been just being able to find or being aware of information that has already been publicly made available (and the legal/institutional reasons for the precedent).
IQuantNY is one of my favorite examples of non-traditional journalists doing great things in civic data analysis using already publicly available datasets: http://iquantny.tumblr.com/
The MTA charging tactics are obvious when you just look at the default options they present when people top up their cards:
Here's the TL;DR:
> Three quick options. But wait a minute. One button leaves you with the same $9.45 card, and gives a remainder of $1.95 after just three uses. The next one is even more frustrating: you end up with a $19.95 card, leaving a remainder after 7 uses of $2.45! That’s right, the nickel we were talking about earlier. The last option does not leave you much better off. You’ll get a $40.95 card, which leads to $0.95 on your card after you use 16 rides. So all three buttons presented leave quite a bit of “insufficient fare” on the card.
http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/96700509489/how-memorizing-19-05-can-help-you-outsmart-the