The ticketing bot is coming: cities are issuing drivers that AI says are bad (update)
In a high-tech move we can all get behind that isn’t dystopian at allThe city of Barcelona feeds camera data from its city buses into advanced artificial intelligence, but they swear they don’t use the footage to ticket bad drivers. Still.
UPDATE 06.12.2025: the ticket bot is coming to Chicago.
Last month, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) contracted Hayden AI to equip six of its transit buses with AI-powered license plate readers to target illegally parked vehicles in the area bounded by North Avenue, Roosevelt Road, Lake Michigan and Ashland Avenue.
As with similar pilots in Barcelona and NYC, Hayden’s AI technology captures information from vehicles illegally blocking buses and bike lanes, then relays its “findings” to a human reviewer for confirmation. If the reviewer agrees with the AI, it can issue a fine of $90 for parking in a bus lane, $250 for obstructing a bike lane, $50 for parking in expired meters outside the central business district, and $140 for passenger vehicles parked in commercial loading zones.
Despite these hefty fines, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is quick to point out that the program is not intended to generate revenue.
“Every Chicagoan deserves a transportation system that is safe, reliable and efficient,” Mayor Johnson said in a statement. “By keeping bus and cycle lanes clear of illegally parked vehicles, the Smart Streets pilot is helping us protect our most vulnerable road users while improving the daily commute for motorists across the city.”
The official release does not mention the fact that the Hayden AI system generated nearly $21 million in revenue for the city in just a few months. despite the fact that thousands of those ticketed were doing nothing wrong.
We wrote about some of these problems back in June. You can read that original article below and let us know what you think about Chicago’s “non-profit” claims in the comments.
Barcelona and its Ring Roads low-emission zone have earned themselves a lot of fans by limiting ICE traffic in the city center. The city’s latest idea to boost mass transit is deploying an artificial intelligence system developed by Hayden AI to automatically enforce dedicated lanes and stops to improve bus traffic — but while it appears to be working as intended, it raises entirely different questions.
“Bus lanes are designed to help provide reliable, fast and comfortable public transport. However, private vehicles illegally using bus lanes make this impossible,” explains Laia Bonet, First Deputy Mayor, Area for Spatial Planning, Ecological Transformation, Urban Services and Housing at the Ajuntament de Barcelona. “We are excited to work with Hayden AI to identify where these issues are occurring and how they are impacting our transit service.”
Currently running as a pilot program on the city’s H12 and D20 bus routes, the system uses cameras installed on the city’s electric buses to detect vehicles that engage in static interference in lanes and bus stops (read: stopping or parking where you shouldn’t). The Hayden AI system then analyzes this data and provides statistical information about what it picks up as the bus travels its daily route.
Hayden AI says that while it takes photos and videos and gathers contextual information about the breach, its cameras do No they register license plates or persons and no penalties are given to drivers or vehicle owners.
So far so good, right? But what happens once the six-episode pilot ends seems like it should set off alarm bells.
large Brother The bus follows
The record is manually checked by a Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) officer, who reportedly checked about 2,500 AI-detected violations in May alone. But even if the system isn’t used to break the rules during the pilot program, it easily could.
And in fact it already has… and AI has risen royally.
AI writes thousands of bad tickets
When AI was given the ability to issue citations in New York earlier this year, it wrote more than 290,000 tickets (that’s right: two hundred and ninety thousand) in just three months, generating nearly $21 million in revenue for the city. There was only one problem: thousands of those drivers were doing nothing wrong.
What’s more, fines generated by AI-powered cameras were only supposed to be approved after to be verified by a human, but either it didn’t happen, or it did and the human operator in question didn’t pay attention, or (perhaps the worst possibility) that the violations were bugs or hallucinations and the human controller couldn’t tell the difference.
In OpenAI’s tests of its latest o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, the company found that the o3 hallucinates 33% of the time during PersonQA tests in which the robot is asked questions about public figures. To short fact-based questions in OpenAI’s SimpleQA tests, it said o3 hallucinates 51% of the time. The o4-mini model fared even worse: it hallucinated 41% of the time in the PersonQA test and 79% of the time in the SimpleQA test, although OpenAI said its poorer performance was expected because it’s a smaller model designed to be faster. OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT update, GPT-4.5, hallucinates less than its o3 and o4-mini counterparts. The company said that when GPT-4.5 was released in February, the model had a hallucination rate of 37.1% in the SimpleQA test.
FORBES
I don’t know about you, but if we had a local traffic cop who got it wrong 33% of the time (at best), I’d be surprised if they kept their job very long. The purpose of AI? Artificial intelligence has multi-billion dollar hype and armies of uneducated believers who talk about singularities and build blonde robots with breasts. And once the AI starts issuing tickets to the AI driving your robot taxi, just call your AI friend at the bank to send you money. No human is needed at any given time and the economy is humming along.
But like – I’m sure it’s fine. Embrace the future and all that…right?
RESOURCES: Hayden AI, via Chicago Sun Times, Forbes, Motorpasión.
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