Rome Police Use Twitter To Battle Illegal Parking 157
cartechboy writes "Illegal parking has always been a major problem in Rome. More than half of Rome's 2.7 million residents use private vehicles, and the ancient city has a staggering ratio of 70 cars per 100 residents. So many residents park, uh, creatively. But now authorities think they've found a way to fight bad parking using social media. Basically, they've asked residents to post photos of bad parking jobs to Twitter. In December, the Italian cops began encouraging smart phone users to snap pics of illegally parked cars and tweet those photos to the department's Twitter account. The new system, which was created by Raffaele Clemente, Rome's chief of traffic police, seems to be working. In the first 30 days, police received more than 1,000 complaints tweeted to their account; (one example is here). Officials were able to respond to around 740 and hand out citations."
Re:Privacy Risks (Score:5, Informative)
A picture is often more useful than a verbal complaint when the police are evaluating whether a given parking situation actually is a violation, and the exact location where it occurred.
And for citizens armed with a cellphone camera and Twitter, it's faster for them to post a pic than to sit on the non-emergency line for several minutes, first on hold for 5 minutes, then some more minutes to describe the vehicle and the location.
Re:Town planning - lack of. (Score:5, Informative)
You keep thinking like this is the US where literally no one lives in the center which is composed of office spaces. This is not the case in European cities. Many people live in the center and quite often their building has no parking space at all. Because it was built in the XIXth century or whatever when people did not need such things. And the streets are often narrow because horses needed less space to move around.