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from the Your-honor,-there-was-a-tree-branch-blocking-the-sign! dept.
Utilizing FOIA and some clever software Mr. Chapman quickly identifies a troubled spot for parking in Chicago and gets results!
http://mchap.io/using-foia-data-and-unix-to-halve-major-source-of-parking-tickets.html
The story relates how the author used Freedom of Information Act requests to gather raw data on parking tickets issued in Chicago. What he received was a semicolon-delimited text file containing a great number of data entry errors. The author outlines the steps taken to clean and extract data on a likely problematic parking location. Armed with this data, he visited the location and discovered very confusing signage. He reported this to the city, who rectified the signage. This led to a 50 percent decrease in the number of tickets issued for that location.
I immediately asked myself three things
1. How much more effective has that corner become?
2. Who's grumbling about the loss of revenue?
3. What would happen if more of us did this very thing?
(Score: 2) by deimios on Thursday August 16 2018, @05:57AM (1 child)
As someone working for a government (not the US) I can safely defer to Hanlon's razor, with a twist: the government employees are too incompetent to do something like this out of malice or greed.
Even so it's surprising that they acted on the information received which goes against the usual modus operandi of aloof ignorance of any and all problems until the press kicks up a fuss.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 16 2018, @11:35AM
I worked for US state government offices for a while, sometimes past experience with press-mess will actually encourage an office to get pro-active and avoid being dragged through the newspapers for the same thing again - at least until the people who personally had to answer to the press are replaced by new drones. Fortunately, lots of government employee drones stay in their jobs for decades.
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