New York City has this cool program that lets anyone report idling commercial vehicles and get a large cut of the fines [1]. It's been in the news recently [2].

I've filed a few reports, and I found the process frustrating and error-prone. The forms are fiddly, there's way too much information that needs to be copied down from the video by hand, you have to use a third-party app to take a timestamped video and a different app to compress it before uploading, and approximately none of it can be done on your phone — the device you probably used to record your video in the first place.

I built Idle Reporter to make filing complaints into a five-minute process that you can do entirely from your phone.

Idle Reporter uses AI to automatically extract all the required information and screenshots from the video and fill out the form for you. It compresses your video, adds the required screenshots, and uploads the whole thing to DEP. All you have to do is log in, give it a final check, and submit.

The AI features cost me money to run, so I put those behind a subscription ($5.99/month, which can pay for itself after a single report). There's a one-week free trial so you can test it out. All the other features — including a fully-featured timestamp camera, which other apps charge for, and an editor for filling out the forms manually and submitting in a single step — will be free forever, as a service to the community.

The app is iOS-only for now — part of this was an exercise in learning SwiftUI in my spare time.

Check it out on the App Store and let me know what you think!

[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...

[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-idling-law-report...

user:	ryeats
created:	May 7, 2025
karma:	94