Every weekday, I wake up at 06:30 and head for the rendezvous point for my company shuttle for a one-hour drive. Usually, the service shuttle picks me no later than 07:15, a point in time that most of the people are still asleep. Today was just one of those ordinary days with one slight difference. There was something wrong with my temperament and I couldn’t cope with the unnecessary horns of many bypassing cars and shuttles. I realized that, as it is free, most people do not refrain from using horns during very early and late hours of the day, with no sensitivity given for people sleeping or being educated. At that point, I wished for an text-message-based service that collects instantaneous reports from citizens about unethical, unlawful or dangerous behavior of drivers… And then I discovered that it is a potentially superb idea of collecting wisdom of crowds for the greater good of public.

I can not say that the citizen’s ability to ticket misbehavior in traffic is zero. If you are keen enough, you can call the 154 service in Turkey to directly connect Police Hotline and tell your complaint. Or in the case of commercial vehicle violations, there is usually an hotline stickered on the vehicle, which you can call and file your complaint. The problem is that both of these methods are effort consuming. Except quite serious circumstances, the effort to call the hotline, wait for the operator and tell the details outweigh the potential benefit of making the violent driver avoid another crossing while red light is on.

What I dream is a crowdticketing or crowdflagging system for traffic issues, which primarily rests on mobile phones. And the tagline should read "everyone is a policeman!".

Let’s say you are just at the pedestrian crossing area when a car ignored the red light and has gone by. You simply write its license plate number, the type of violation (in this case, it should be something like ‘violate pedestrian crossing’) and voila. The violation is received by the system and is instantly linked to the license plate. When there is the GPS function embedded in the mobile phone system, it is even better. You simply add the GPS data in the text message, and the system will know exactly when and where that license plate violated some laws or showed misbehavior.

I am not taking the highest proponent level that this database should form a strict source for issuing bans or fines. But it may help mainly with two ways:

1. When a serious complaint is made to police hotline, the officers can login to this system and see whether that license plate has received some similar flags from the crowdticketing system. By doing so, police can have its case reinforced and commit to a serious legal action.
2. In the case of multiple flagging, police officers can be convinced that a particular driver is ‘hot’, that is he is on a violating track right now. In this case, let’s say the first user reports a particular driver about speeding and 10 minutes later, another user reports the same car for dangerous driving or not stopping at a stop sign. In such situation, police officers would know that different, and independent, sources of information will reveal a outlaw driver case!

Although I foresee many opposing ideas to this case, I still believe this would be a great complementary service for public good and wealth. If that service existed, I would certainly flag many drivers using their horns unnecessarily early morning…

So what do you think? Anybody out there to turn this idea into another web 2.0 service?