If you’ve ever had trouble with a footpath, bus stop, or other piece of urban infrastructure, you probably know the hassles of dealing with a local council. It can be incredibly difficult just to track down the right avenue to report issues, let alone get them sorted in a timely fashion.
In the suburban streets of one Australian city, though, that’s changing somewhat. New smart garbage trucks are becoming instruments of infrastructure surveillance, serving a dual purpose that could reshape urban management. Naturally, though, this new technology raises issues around ethics and privacy.
I know in our own Province of Western Cape, in South Africa, they had been experimenting a few years ago with vehicles to drive around and record potholes for repair. But that was before AI (meaning that it need no longer just be for potholes) and it was all done with a specific vehicle in mind (way better to put it on a vehicle that regularly travels along most streets in a city).
Not only can this timeously record issues, but even more important, it can measure how long it takes to actually be repaired. I get really irritated when our own municipality closes out calls as soon as they’ve been scheduled for repair, as the actual repair may only be a month later. As I pointed out to them in an escalation, citizens measure performance by when something is actually repaired, not by how quickly it can be scheduled for repair to happen later.
And yes I get it that many may be quite worried about privacy, but I suppose that is also why these streets are called public roads. I would expect such a system to have some assurances (and audits) that facial recognition is not being used (no, I don’t suppose the municipality would prevent number plate recognition, because after all, they’ll want to recover those outstanding speeding fines while they’re at it).
Something I’ve also long suggested to our municipality also is, why can’t the garbage trucks beacon out their location, so we know exactly when to put our bins out. Maybe we can get that functionality in exchange for this AI scanning.
See https://hackaday.com/2023/08/24/smart-garbage-trucks-help-with-street-maintenance/