10 ms·

Fixed, App That Fixes Parking Tickets, Gets Blocked in SF, Oakland and L.A

124 points by confiscate 11y ago

ccvannorman 11y ago
god damn it. Fuck parking tickets and everything they stand for. I'd rather live in parking anarchy.
- MBlume 11y ago
  I get where you're coming from. Police departments enforcing the rules not to better the community they serve but to bring in money to pay their salaries. It pisses me off too. The thing is, free parking fucks up cities[0][1]. It makes driving seem like a better idea than it is. It encourages sprawl. We need ways for people to pay for the space their cars occupy, and that means we need ways to punish people who take that space and don't pay. And, yeah, that means we need parking tickets. [0] http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf [1] http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/193236496X http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/1...
  - Danilka 11y ago
    I only partially agree with that. There are plenty of more liberal ways to enforce parking payments and rules following. However, cities choose to take advantage of the situation and abuse the system. For example, SFMTA could easily charge half of what they do for towing and people would still park illegally ONLY when they misunderstood something or lost track of time. Don't even get me started on meters. Why do chosen people pay $75 for a minute overtime and not all pay for what they overtimed instead? (hint: more money to the city) At any case, we all know that the system is abused and it has to change at some point. When? That depends on how long all of us are going to let this slide.
    - MBlume 11y ago
      Yeah, you're not wrong. In particular, the fact that the SFMTA isn't cooperating with the part of the program that's just supposed to make paying the tickets easier is kind of damning. I'd like to think that better technology could make enforcement cheaper, more consistent, and thus drive down penalties, but there are enough rent-seeking bastards involved to give me pause there.
stevesearer 11y ago
My office has a direct street view of a red no parking zone that stretches an entire block of Santa Barbara. I'm amazed an how many people park their cars with the hazards on to run into a shop and come protest when parking enforcement inevitably rolls around and issues them a ticket. Especially because there are two "free for 75 minute" lots around the corner. I've even watched parking enforcement sit and wait for five or so minutes to start issuing the ticket and the driver came out and said they had only just stopped in for a second. No idea how it works elsewhere but it looks like the officers have some sort of device that they take a picture of the vehicle doing whatever they are doing incorrectly, which is kind of the opposite of what this app is for. I imagine it records time and location as well for the same reasons and Fixed which is to keep people honest. I find this interesting because even though there is a market for this tech to the people receiving tickets, there is also a market to help improve the way tickets are given by enforcement. Though of course there may not be incentives to improve when $$ is at stake.
- comrh 11y ago
  I can't even remember a parking ticket I got that wasn't my fault.
  - themartorana 11y ago
    That's easy. If you live in Philly, it's hard to remember one you did deserve. (No, I'm not joking.)
    - comrh 11y ago
      Could you give me an example? They just write a ticket for something that never happened?
      - dec0dedab0de 11y ago
        One time I parked in chinatown at 5:30 am on a Sunday in a spot that has free parking on Sunday. At 2:00 pm when I left there was a protest, with a full band, bleachers, and a dancing dragon around my car. Along with a temporary no parking sign, and a ticket. That sign was definitely not there in the morning, but I had no proof, so I just paid it. Interesting side note, I recently had an Uber driver who worked for the PPA.
pbreit 11y ago
I'm sure this will get spun as big, bad, out-of-touch government. Was Fixed evaluating the inquiries before forwarding them on? If so, I'd expect a higher win rate. If not, I'd expect a much lower win rate as customers just mail in every ticket. It's something you would definitely need to be very sensitive to how much useless work your triggering at City Hall.
- garrettgrimsley 11y ago
  >Was Fixed evaluating the inquiries before forwarding them on? Yes, they were. >Using its app, Fixed customers could snap a photo of their parking ticket using their phone’s camera, and then Fixed would check against a variety of common errors before writing a customized letter to the city on the user’s behalf. The app also cleverly tapped into Google Street View to check to see if the city had the proper signage in place in the area a ticket was received. >Founder David Hegarty once noted that over half of tickets have an issue that would make them invalid, but the city didn’t tend to play by its own rules when arbitrating disputes. That made Fixed’s “win” rate only 20%-30% on tickets, as of earlier this year. >It's something you would definitely need to be very sensitive to how much useless work your triggering at City Hall. The city could simply not issue invalid tickets, the issue would then resolve itself.
  - comrh 11y ago
    >Using its app, Fixed customers could snap a photo of their parking ticket using their phone’s camera, and then Fixed would check against a variety of common errors before writing a customized letter to the city on the user’s behalf. The app also cleverly tapped into Google Street View to check to see if the city had the proper signage in place in the area a ticket was received. They should open source that so it can just be a web app, entirely possible it could still be really useful.
    - wingerlang 11y ago
      Surely they must have been checking these errors manually, so open sourcing wouldn't really do anything other than getting the map location - which I think you could find yourself.
gkoberger 11y ago
My favorite thing about Fixed was that they paid my ticket and I didn't have to worry about it. Most tickets I got, I deserved. Okay, all the tickets. But I constantly put off paying them since it was such a hassle. It was nice to have Fixed just pay them for me.
- stevesearer 11y ago
  I was listening to an interview recently (though I can't remember where) that was discussing how some people park violating the rules knowing they will likely get a ticket, but justify it because the cost of a parking permit or lot fees will end up being more expensive that their accumulation of parking ticket fees.
  - sokoloff 11y ago
    I did that for years. Parking at my apartment building was $350/mo (and was valet only, so it was also a major PITA). I often parked at my work garage and walked home, but many times parked on the street/at meters, and didn't sweat it too much if I got the occasional ticket (not getting back to the car early enough, usually) It was virtually impossible to run up a total anywhere near the cost of the less convenient valet parking. For the longest time in college, garage parking in Harvard Sq was $14-20/evening and a residential parking violation in a nearby neighborhood was $10 or $15. So we often used the "stochastic parking garage".
    - zkhalique 11y ago
      In New York, they put a boot on your car after a while. Or tow it. And then it becomes more expensive.
      - imaginenore 11y ago
        In NYC I paid $44 for parking on the street cleaning side, and you are pretty much guaranteed to get the ticket if parked incorrectly. So it only takes 8 tickets to reach $350. Don't see how that scheme would work, plus you have to pay for each ticket, which is a hassle.
Spivak 11y ago
So an app which was correctly identifying parking tickets which were improperly issued, automating the completely legal dispute process, and making it easier for people to pay their fines was blocked because...? I really want to believe that there's another side to this that's more substantial than, "we're too lazy to issue citations correctly, we're banking on the average person not knowing that their ticket was improperly issued, and we're counting on people forgetting to pay to rack up those sweet, sweet late fees" but I can't think of anything. Can someone possibly shed some light on these cities' reasonings?
- eridius 11y ago
  Probably more along the lines of "we can't afford to lose this revenue, especially due to technicalities over the issuance of an otherwise-legitimate ticket".
  - girvo 11y ago
    Our legal system and bureaucracies are built on technicalities. Do you think they wouldn't use a technicality to nail you to the wall for something? I've got little sympathy for an entity getting upset at it's own rules being used against it.
    - branchan 11y ago
      Just like a speeding ticket, even if the cop wrote your name wrong, it doesn't mean that you are going to get away with it.
- dougmccune 11y ago
  My wife has used Fixed in SF a couple times, so my data is purely anecdotal. By in my view Fixed deserves to be banned. In the two cases we used Fixed (both of which were valid tickets btw) they sent the exact same form letter disputing the ticket, even though the two tickets had nothing in common. From what I could tell the business model seemed to be 1) send entirely generic form letter at very little cost to dispute every single ticket, regardless of merit 2) assume that you can overwhelm the system and they'll just give up on some percentage of the tickets 3) profit. It didn't seem like anyone at Fixed was reviewing tickets or coming up with legit justifications for disputing the tickets. If you parked for 3 days in a handicapped space that blocked a hospital emergency room they would send in the same form letter to dispute the ticket. If Fixed was successful then by definition every ticket issued would result in a dispute. That's simply untenable for a city to deal with. To me it felt entirely like a "this is why we can't have nice things" scenario. Give legit people a way to dispute tickets and up springs a startup that takes advantage of the limitations of the system and fucks it up for everyone.
tbarbugli 11y ago
they should move their operations to Belgium, the country where police tow cars just because they can :)
mc32 11y ago
The SFMTA is a racket. I've had the misfortune to have to deal with them on a few occasions and they are some of the least accountable people working for the government. I went thru the whole process of contacting their supervisors directly to dispute tickets [they sometimes presume you're not home and aware] and it basically boiled down to their word vs mine. Such BS. I would love to see the agency dissolved, but it makes too much money needed to sustain other pet projects that this sacred cow is going nowhere, unfortunately. My vain hope is they sue these municipalities to get access to those county (public?) resources which would allow them to operate in those communities again.
- edge17 11y ago
  I got a ticket once for not turning my wheels on 2nd between Townsend and Brannan. The law is your wheels must be turned if the grade is greater than 3%. The grade, according to the department of public works, is 3.09% (http://bsm.sfdpw.org/subdmap/subd/Key_Maps/319_gm.tif http://bsm.sfdpw.org/subdmap/subd/Key_Maps/319_gm.tif). Next time I'll bring my protractor. the MTA is too lazy to do a lot of things. They employ antiquated technology and pass the cost of their own inefficiency to the consumer in every place they can. -Adding money to a Clipper Card from the website takes several days before the credit can be used. Apparently this has to do with the specific scanning hardware they have on the buses and some legacy Translink interoperability issues or something. -Many of the parking kiosks interface are confusing (I once tried helping a lady only to find out she'd put in $20 because she kept not understanding she had paid). -Fare-checkers are extremely self-righteous and rude. I once got off the back door of a Muni train because I'd realized my Clipper card was empty. On the way to the front door to pay in cash, the fare-checker told me he was going to write me a ticket because I got on and off the bus and that, despite my honest intention to pay the fare, he was going to write me up. -Towing is $600, which includes $250some in SF admin fees, $250 is towing, and other other fees the towing company can freely tack on to work around the maximum "towing" fee that the city allows (in my case, a Flatbed Truck fee of $80). -If you car gets stolen, and the police find it you get a 30 minute "courtesy" window to get to your car before they tow your car and you pay $500-$600 to get it out of the impound. A friend that works for the city was telling me that the MTA has a lot of inefficiencies because they have humans in the process every step of the way and no incentive to change that. When they need to modify the process, they just add another human and another fee.
swang 11y ago
I just finally read the article about why it was getting blocked (TC wouldn't load on my mobile) and it is completely laughable how corrupt SFMTA is about this matter. "Hey you're helping people not pay us!" Again, tickets are a fucking racket.
junto 11y ago
Just shows that parking fonts are used as an indiscriminate taxation on car owners. Local authorities use them to raise revenue and have become dependent on them. This leads to an abuse of traffic control which instead of being related to safety, becomes related to profit. That includes the actions of local authorities in deliberately reducing legitimate parking spaces for car owners in order to force car owners to park illegally.
- junto 11y ago
  Sorry, I meant "parking fines". Mobile auto-correct... "Parking fonts" must just be extremely hard to read fonts especially for no parking signs!
zanzibarstander 11y ago
Saying that a parking ticket is "invalid" is a legal argument, and a company that makes legal arguments for people is a law firm. "Fixed" seems to be practicing law without a license. I'm sort of baffled that this got funded--who did the legal due diligence on this?
- pavornyoh 11y ago
  > Saying that a parking ticket is "invalid" is a legal argument, and a company that makes legal arguments for people is a law firm. "Fixed" seems to be practicing law without a license. I beg to differ. Your thinking is wrong IMO. Anyone can dispute a parking ticket and they don't need a law license to do that. What Fixed is doing is just doing it on their behalf. Let me ask you question, do you hire a lawyer to file a dispute for a $350 parking ticket?
  - corin_ 11y ago
    Your question isn't particularly useful, some people might not hire a lawyer to fight against an accusation of murder, but it doesn't mean if you did hire someone to do it they wouldn't need to be qualified. Equally I'd be shocked if nobody had ever used a lawyer to contest a parking ticket.
    - pavornyoh 11y ago
      >Your question isn't particularly useful, some people might not hire a lawyer to fight against an accusation of murder, but it doesn't mean if you did hire someone to do it they wouldn't need to be qualified. You and I are thinking different things. A parking ticket and murder are 2 different things and should not be lumped together. Consider how much a lawyer charges an hour hence my question. If the parking tickets where $5,000 then my question wouldn't be useful. Why would I pay a lawyer $450 an hour to dispute a $350 charge? Fixed does not need a legal license to dispute tickets on behalf of others.
      - corin_ 11y ago

124 points by confiscate 11y ago

ccvannorman 11y ago

god damn it. Fuck parking tickets and everything they stand for. I'd rather live in parking anarchy.

MBlume 11y ago
I get where you're coming from. Police departments enforcing the rules not to better the community they serve but to bring in money to pay their salaries. It pisses me off too. The thing is, free parking fucks up cities[0][1]. It makes driving seem like a better idea than it is. It encourages sprawl. We need ways for people to pay for the space their cars occupy, and that means we need ways to punish people who take that space and don't pay. And, yeah, that means we need parking tickets. [0] http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf [1] http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/193236496X http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/1...
- Danilka 11y ago
  I only partially agree with that. There are plenty of more liberal ways to enforce parking payments and rules following. However, cities choose to take advantage of the situation and abuse the system. For example, SFMTA could easily charge half of what they do for towing and people would still park illegally ONLY when they misunderstood something or lost track of time. Don't even get me started on meters. Why do chosen people pay $75 for a minute overtime and not all pay for what they overtimed instead? (hint: more money to the city) At any case, we all know that the system is abused and it has to change at some point. When? That depends on how long all of us are going to let this slide.
  - MBlume 11y ago
    Yeah, you're not wrong. In particular, the fact that the SFMTA isn't cooperating with the part of the program that's just supposed to make paying the tickets easier is kind of damning. I'd like to think that better technology could make enforcement cheaper, more consistent, and thus drive down penalties, but there are enough rent-seeking bastards involved to give me pause there.

stevesearer 11y ago

My office has a direct street view of a red no parking zone that stretches an entire block of Santa Barbara. I'm amazed an how many people park their cars with the hazards on to run into a shop and come protest when parking enforcement inevitably rolls around and issues them a ticket. Especially because there are two "free for 75 minute" lots around the corner. I've even watched parking enforcement sit and wait for five or so minutes to start issuing the ticket and the driver came out and said they had only just stopped in for a second. No idea how it works elsewhere but it looks like the officers have some sort of device that they take a picture of the vehicle doing whatever they are doing incorrectly, which is kind of the opposite of what this app is for. I imagine it records time and location as well for the same reasons and Fixed which is to keep people honest. I find this interesting because even though there is a market for this tech to the people receiving tickets, there is also a market to help improve the way tickets are given by enforcement. Though of course there may not be incentives to improve when $$ is at stake.

comrh 11y ago
I can't even remember a parking ticket I got that wasn't my fault.
- themartorana 11y ago
  That's easy. If you live in Philly, it's hard to remember one you did deserve. (No, I'm not joking.)
  - comrh 11y ago
    Could you give me an example? They just write a ticket for something that never happened?
    - dec0dedab0de 11y ago
      One time I parked in chinatown at 5:30 am on a Sunday in a spot that has free parking on Sunday. At 2:00 pm when I left there was a protest, with a full band, bleachers, and a dancing dragon around my car. Along with a temporary no parking sign, and a ticket. That sign was definitely not there in the morning, but I had no proof, so I just paid it. Interesting side note, I recently had an Uber driver who worked for the PPA.

pbreit 11y ago

I'm sure this will get spun as big, bad, out-of-touch government. Was Fixed evaluating the inquiries before forwarding them on? If so, I'd expect a higher win rate. If not, I'd expect a much lower win rate as customers just mail in every ticket. It's something you would definitely need to be very sensitive to how much useless work your triggering at City Hall.

garrettgrimsley 11y ago
>Was Fixed evaluating the inquiries before forwarding them on? Yes, they were. >Using its app, Fixed customers could snap a photo of their parking ticket using their phone’s camera, and then Fixed would check against a variety of common errors before writing a customized letter to the city on the user’s behalf. The app also cleverly tapped into Google Street View to check to see if the city had the proper signage in place in the area a ticket was received. >Founder David Hegarty once noted that over half of tickets have an issue that would make them invalid, but the city didn’t tend to play by its own rules when arbitrating disputes. That made Fixed’s “win” rate only 20%-30% on tickets, as of earlier this year. >It's something you would definitely need to be very sensitive to how much useless work your triggering at City Hall. The city could simply not issue invalid tickets, the issue would then resolve itself.
- comrh 11y ago
  >Using its app, Fixed customers could snap a photo of their parking ticket using their phone’s camera, and then Fixed would check against a variety of common errors before writing a customized letter to the city on the user’s behalf. The app also cleverly tapped into Google Street View to check to see if the city had the proper signage in place in the area a ticket was received. They should open source that so it can just be a web app, entirely possible it could still be really useful.
  - wingerlang 11y ago
    Surely they must have been checking these errors manually, so open sourcing wouldn't really do anything other than getting the map location - which I think you could find yourself.

gkoberger 11y ago

My favorite thing about Fixed was that they paid my ticket and I didn't have to worry about it. Most tickets I got, I deserved. Okay, all the tickets. But I constantly put off paying them since it was such a hassle. It was nice to have Fixed just pay them for me.

stevesearer 11y ago
I was listening to an interview recently (though I can't remember where) that was discussing how some people park violating the rules knowing they will likely get a ticket, but justify it because the cost of a parking permit or lot fees will end up being more expensive that their accumulation of parking ticket fees.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  I did that for years. Parking at my apartment building was $350/mo (and was valet only, so it was also a major PITA). I often parked at my work garage and walked home, but many times parked on the street/at meters, and didn't sweat it too much if I got the occasional ticket (not getting back to the car early enough, usually) It was virtually impossible to run up a total anywhere near the cost of the less convenient valet parking. For the longest time in college, garage parking in Harvard Sq was $14-20/evening and a residential parking violation in a nearby neighborhood was $10 or $15. So we often used the "stochastic parking garage".
  - zkhalique 11y ago
    In New York, they put a boot on your car after a while. Or tow it. And then it becomes more expensive.
    - imaginenore 11y ago
      In NYC I paid $44 for parking on the street cleaning side, and you are pretty much guaranteed to get the ticket if parked incorrectly. So it only takes 8 tickets to reach $350. Don't see how that scheme would work, plus you have to pay for each ticket, which is a hassle.

Spivak 11y ago

So an app which was correctly identifying parking tickets which were improperly issued, automating the completely legal dispute process, and making it easier for people to pay their fines was blocked because...? I really want to believe that there's another side to this that's more substantial than, "we're too lazy to issue citations correctly, we're banking on the average person not knowing that their ticket was improperly issued, and we're counting on people forgetting to pay to rack up those sweet, sweet late fees" but I can't think of anything. Can someone possibly shed some light on these cities' reasonings?

eridius 11y ago
Probably more along the lines of "we can't afford to lose this revenue, especially due to technicalities over the issuance of an otherwise-legitimate ticket".
- girvo 11y ago
  Our legal system and bureaucracies are built on technicalities. Do you think they wouldn't use a technicality to nail you to the wall for something? I've got little sympathy for an entity getting upset at it's own rules being used against it.
  - branchan 11y ago
    Just like a speeding ticket, even if the cop wrote your name wrong, it doesn't mean that you are going to get away with it.
dougmccune 11y ago
My wife has used Fixed in SF a couple times, so my data is purely anecdotal. By in my view Fixed deserves to be banned. In the two cases we used Fixed (both of which were valid tickets btw) they sent the exact same form letter disputing the ticket, even though the two tickets had nothing in common. From what I could tell the business model seemed to be 1) send entirely generic form letter at very little cost to dispute every single ticket, regardless of merit 2) assume that you can overwhelm the system and they'll just give up on some percentage of the tickets 3) profit. It didn't seem like anyone at Fixed was reviewing tickets or coming up with legit justifications for disputing the tickets. If you parked for 3 days in a handicapped space that blocked a hospital emergency room they would send in the same form letter to dispute the ticket. If Fixed was successful then by definition every ticket issued would result in a dispute. That's simply untenable for a city to deal with. To me it felt entirely like a "this is why we can't have nice things" scenario. Give legit people a way to dispute tickets and up springs a startup that takes advantage of the limitations of the system and fucks it up for everyone.

tbarbugli 11y ago

they should move their operations to Belgium, the country where police tow cars just because they can :)

mc32 11y ago

The SFMTA is a racket. I've had the misfortune to have to deal with them on a few occasions and they are some of the least accountable people working for the government. I went thru the whole process of contacting their supervisors directly to dispute tickets [they sometimes presume you're not home and aware] and it basically boiled down to their word vs mine. Such BS. I would love to see the agency dissolved, but it makes too much money needed to sustain other pet projects that this sacred cow is going nowhere, unfortunately. My vain hope is they sue these municipalities to get access to those county (public?) resources which would allow them to operate in those communities again.

edge17 11y ago
I got a ticket once for not turning my wheels on 2nd between Townsend and Brannan. The law is your wheels must be turned if the grade is greater than 3%. The grade, according to the department of public works, is 3.09% (http://bsm.sfdpw.org/subdmap/subd/Key_Maps/319_gm.tif http://bsm.sfdpw.org/subdmap/subd/Key_Maps/319_gm.tif). Next time I'll bring my protractor. the MTA is too lazy to do a lot of things. They employ antiquated technology and pass the cost of their own inefficiency to the consumer in every place they can. -Adding money to a Clipper Card from the website takes several days before the credit can be used. Apparently this has to do with the specific scanning hardware they have on the buses and some legacy Translink interoperability issues or something. -Many of the parking kiosks interface are confusing (I once tried helping a lady only to find out she'd put in $20 because she kept not understanding she had paid). -Fare-checkers are extremely self-righteous and rude. I once got off the back door of a Muni train because I'd realized my Clipper card was empty. On the way to the front door to pay in cash, the fare-checker told me he was going to write me a ticket because I got on and off the bus and that, despite my honest intention to pay the fare, he was going to write me up. -Towing is $600, which includes $250some in SF admin fees, $250 is towing, and other other fees the towing company can freely tack on to work around the maximum "towing" fee that the city allows (in my case, a Flatbed Truck fee of $80). -If you car gets stolen, and the police find it you get a 30 minute "courtesy" window to get to your car before they tow your car and you pay $500-$600 to get it out of the impound. A friend that works for the city was telling me that the MTA has a lot of inefficiencies because they have humans in the process every step of the way and no incentive to change that. When they need to modify the process, they just add another human and another fee.

swang 11y ago

I just finally read the article about why it was getting blocked (TC wouldn't load on my mobile) and it is completely laughable how corrupt SFMTA is about this matter. "Hey you're helping people not pay us!" Again, tickets are a fucking racket.

junto 11y ago

Just shows that parking fonts are used as an indiscriminate taxation on car owners. Local authorities use them to raise revenue and have become dependent on them. This leads to an abuse of traffic control which instead of being related to safety, becomes related to profit. That includes the actions of local authorities in deliberately reducing legitimate parking spaces for car owners in order to force car owners to park illegally.

junto 11y ago
Sorry, I meant "parking fines". Mobile auto-correct... "Parking fonts" must just be extremely hard to read fonts especially for no parking signs!

zanzibarstander 11y ago

Saying that a parking ticket is "invalid" is a legal argument, and a company that makes legal arguments for people is a law firm. "Fixed" seems to be practicing law without a license. I'm sort of baffled that this got funded--who did the legal due diligence on this?

pavornyoh 11y ago
> Saying that a parking ticket is "invalid" is a legal argument, and a company that makes legal arguments for people is a law firm. "Fixed" seems to be practicing law without a license. I beg to differ. Your thinking is wrong IMO. Anyone can dispute a parking ticket and they don't need a law license to do that. What Fixed is doing is just doing it on their behalf. Let me ask you question, do you hire a lawyer to file a dispute for a $350 parking ticket?
- corin_ 11y ago
  Your question isn't particularly useful, some people might not hire a lawyer to fight against an accusation of murder, but it doesn't mean if you did hire someone to do it they wouldn't need to be qualified. Equally I'd be shocked if nobody had ever used a lawyer to contest a parking ticket.
  - pavornyoh 11y ago
    >Your question isn't particularly useful, some people might not hire a lawyer to fight against an accusation of murder, but it doesn't mean if you did hire someone to do it they wouldn't need to be qualified. You and I are thinking different things. A parking ticket and murder are 2 different things and should not be lumped together. Consider how much a lawyer charges an hour hence my question. If the parking tickets where $5,000 then my question wouldn't be useful. Why would I pay a lawyer $450 an hour to dispute a $350 charge? Fixed does not need a legal license to dispute tickets on behalf of others.
    - corin_ 11y ago