7 ms·

Fix a Parking Ticket? There's an App for That

71 points by steven 12y ago

wdewind 12y ago
So this whole thing reads as if it was written from the perspective of the founders of Fixed, and is a story about how great their service is. Lot of talk about Submarines[1] lately, over under on this being one? [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- larrys 12y ago
  Regardless of the PR angle I found it valuable and it got me thinking of a few similar ideas. Also I don't think this compares to the "suits are making a comeback" at all in the sense that it's at least a new and unique idea ... it's not a rehash used strictly to manipulate the public.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- icelancer 12y ago
  Of course this is one. Submarines make up 20-40% of all stories. Work at a news desk or cable station and you'll see it firsthand.
boxcardavin 12y ago
I've been on the numbered waitlist for Seattle for 6 months or so, it hasn't budged. Meh.
dsugarman 12y ago
huge fan, can't wait for traffic camera support across the US which is one of the biggest impediments on our 4th Amendment rights in our country's young history.
larrys 12y ago
As a concept this is a good idea and can be applied to righting other "wrongs". For example there have always been companies that will audit utility bills for companies (and possibly individuals) but they are not widely known to the general public. If you make it easy for people they would almost certainly take a snap of their utility bill and let someone else do the work in exchange for a cut of the refund. For one thing the company doing the work knows the lay of the land. They know exactly what to look for and aren't going to spin their wheels. They don't have to spend time learning. But there is another dynamic going on here as well. Similar in a way to why people do garage sales when the net revenue in many cases doesn't exceed the effort. The reason is they'd rather get $2.00 or even .50c for something rather than throwing it out. It's not about the money in other words. (Likewise you'd rather give away for free to someone rather than throwing out because to your brain that feels like karma..) With this type of service better that someone takes up your cause and allows you to feel that you did something rather than feel like a, for lack of a better way to put it, a schmuck who did nothing. I can see a wide range of possibilities for these "justice" or even "advocate" as a service ideas.
- icelancer 12y ago
  Definitely, you hit the nail on the head. These services are usually spearheaded by people who can make a fair bit of money, but probably not as much if they turned their efforts towards other things. But they get great satisfaction by solving a real problem - government stupidity - and that's worth a lot. Actually that explains why I am no longer a data scientist and why I work in sports science now, making 40% of my previous salary.
dfxm12 12y ago
I know of cities that seem to be working actively against its residents with arcane laws about when, where and who is allowed to park in a specific spot at a specific time, so I'm glad someone is sticking up for the little guy. However, I wish government was transparent enough that services like this weren't needed. Why do I have to take a day off from work to fight a ticket whose fee is (probably) worth less to me than a vacation day (first world problem, I know)? I think I'm also lucky enough to have lived in a few cities where I didn't feel that the parking authority is actively working against me. I've gotten many parking tickets, and I can honestly say all but one were justified... That said, I am rather fond of this quote: A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works. -Bill Vaughan
- icelancer 12y ago
  > However, I wish government was transparent enough that services like this weren't needed I do too, but the sooner we realize this is impossible, the sooner we can all get over it and turn the responsibilities over to third party private organizations.
  - rtpg 12y ago
    I think telecoms have proven that this hypothesis doesn't hold up very well. Try unsubscribing from cable.
    - recursive 12y ago
      With cable, at least it's possible to never subscribe in the first place. That doesn't work with governments.
      - rtpg 12y ago
        don't own a car/house/etc. and you can greatly reduce your interaction surface with government. At least in France the only interaction I have with the gov't is voting, getting a letter to pay my habitation taxes, and having to renew my passport. If you think it's unreasonable to not have a car, it might be unreasonable to not have an internet connection too...
dmritard96 12y ago
“The incentives are all messed up,” says Hegarty. Cities have come to rely on parking tickets as a source of sorely needed revenue, he explains. The more parking tickets, the better the budget numbers." This also applies to them given their business model.
- mikeash 12y ago
  It does, but at least they don't have a conflict of interest from making, enforcing, and profiting from the rules all at once.
thrownaway2424 12y ago
Great, so now you can outsource being an asshole? This guy needs to suck it up, pay his tickets, read the signs, and stop driving and parking like a moron. Best approach for people who absolutely cannot be bothered to read and follow the rules would probably be to sell the car and join a car sharing service where the parking spaces are dedicated.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  That cuts both ways, you realize? The guy in the article got his tickets killed because the moronic city broke the law by not having the signage posted correctly: >Fixed came through. The startup couldn’t do anything about the street cleaning ticket, but after reviewing some Google Street View pictures of the scene of the parking ticket crime, one of Fixed’s full-time “advocates” determined that the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA) had not complied with California state law specifying where parking signage must be placed. The city needs to suck it up and follow their own laws if they're going to levy stealth taxes on people. Live by the law, die by the law.
  - zippergz 12y ago
    It doesn't say he parked there because he thought it was legal due to the signs. It says he parked there because he "forgot his car." The incorrect signage was a technicality that allowed him to get out of paying the ticket.
    - Karunamon 12y ago
      And? The tickets were therefore unjustified. Live by the law, die by the law.
- pmorici 12y ago
  Why does exercising your constitutional right for legal do process make you an asshole?
  - noarchy 12y ago
patio11 12y ago
Wait until this isn't for parking tickets but rather for Social Security disability determinations or VA mid-term disability determinations or Illinois DOT public right-of-way ingress/egress waivers or... Crystallized knowledge of how to play the bureaucracy game, in a box, backed up by a pool of people you can grant e.g. Power of Attorney to is freaking brilliant. If it helps, think of it as exposing a web/mobile UI to City Hall without them having to figure out how to do that or upset stakeholders whose jobs are created by Form 213B. Except it is even bigger than that implies.
- icelancer 12y ago
  Please god, yes. The government will never solve its own bureaucracy. I am so willing to pay a third party to do it for me.
  - xur17 12y ago
    I absolutely agree. I just moved to a new state, and I figured the process for registering my car / getting a new license would be fairly straightforward, but boy was I wrong... I would have easily paid a few bucks for a app that walks me through the process, including where I need to go, etc.
    - icelancer 12y ago
      Despite the fact that King County and Seattle are full of bureaucratic idiots who dug a tunnel that will make traffic worse and will cost 2x it's normal budget (at least), most of the city/state services are really not too bad. Online billpays are universal and rate a solid D+ for usability (pretty good for the government) and most of the local offices for DMV/DOL work are actually pretty good. Now if you have unpaid parking tickets, you are totally screwed. You have to drive downtown and fill out forms in triplicate while paying them off before you come back to your local municipality's convenient place. Why can't you do it at your local place? Who knows! But honestly that's way better than the handful of other states I've lived in, which says a lot about government services. So if that's the BEST we can do, yeah. We need these services for everything, post haste.
0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
Still waiting for the app that enables the comeback of the meter maids.
tzs 12y ago
I don't get the tie to libertarianism the article tries to make. The service seems no more libertarian to me than any other service that provides assistance in dealing with a government agency. I wouldn't call H&R Block "libertarian", for example, for helping people minimize what they pay in taxes. Fixed is not doing anything fundamentally different from what H&R Block does--they are just dealing with a different government and different agency. I am curious about how they actually represent their clients at a traffic ticket hearing. Does traffic ticket court allow people to be represented by non-lawyers, or does Fixed send a lawyer to actual appear to contest the ticket?
- Guvante 12y ago
  Given their webpage says explicitly that it is not an attorney client relationship I doubt they will represent you in court. What could happen is they give you all the information you need to show up to your court date and listen to their channels for how it went.
  - tzs 12y ago
    I did some searching, and apparently there are three levels of contesting an SFMTA ticket. 1. You submit your objection to the ticket and supply supporting evidence, and they accept or reject it. 2. If rejected, you can try again at an administrative hearing. 3. If that fails, you can go to Superior Court. Only #2 and #3 require the presence of you or a representative. Presumably, Fixed works at the #1 level only.
petercooper 12y ago
So I'm assuming Fixed made $76 in this case (4 x $76 tickets were dismissed, so 25% = $76) but the article says only 20-30% are actually dismissed (so only 20-30% of tickets result in income for Fixed?) and, well, it could have been a single $76 ticket with a mere $19 potential payday.. How does it financially make sense to run a company like Fixed? I'm intrigued, and probably making false assumptions, so correct me ;-)
- mbesto 12y ago
  Nope, you pay 10% (IIRC) of it if doesn't get dismissed. They handle that payment transaction for you, so the 10% isn't terrible considering how much of a PITA it is to try to use the metro's ticket payment system.
- ianferrel 12y ago
  There are probably very high fixed costs in successfully contesting tickets. You have to fill out a form. You have to understand how it works. You have to know what the laws are, and what a likely avenue to contest is. You probably have to mail or physically hand the form in. For many people, it's not worth the effort. It might be hours of work for a relatively small gain. For the company, they can catalog the institutional knowledge required, then very quickly assess whether a given ticket falls into one of the categories they know how to contest, print out the form automatically, then mail or submit them in bulk. 700 tickets a week * 0.70 contested * 0.20-.30 won * $76/ticket * .25 fee * 52 weeks = $97-145k/year revenue. Looks like they're just two founders right now, so that's not unreasonable.
jrochkind1 12y ago
You always could hire a lawyer to help you contest parking tickets, and the lawyer always (or at least for decades now) could choose to charge you on contingency only if you won. I guess what Fixed has done is figure out a way to use technology to make this business model financially feasible for the legal firm. Or at least they think they have. We'll see. Oh, except someone else in the thread says Fixed tries to tell you it's not an attorney-client relationship, so perhaps they don't have lawyers involved. I'd expect if they become succesful enough that the city doesn't like them, then, the city will try to argue that what they are doing is practicing law without a license. It's odd to me that they don't get some lawyers on staff and say, sure, it's a legal service; have to think through what the problems for their business would be there, not sure, but maybe the challenges of complying with legal standards for legal services are riskier than then the threat of someone succesfully arguing you practicing law without a license. Presumably they their own legal advice on their business model, for the business where they say they aren't giving their customers legal advice. Or is it just another Uber approach "If we get succesful enough, we can convince people that existing laws don't apply if you make an app... cause... internet?"
- zyxley 12y ago
  I'm guessing their power of attorney is (despite the name) specifically constructed so that they're acting directly as a proxy for you rather than in the capacity of of a lawyer. It's organized by a company, but the intent seems to be for it be legally identical to you paying a friend who knows city hall really well to go go send in some forms for you. There's no legal advice involved, too, as far as I can tell. They give you a percentage chance of successfully fighting the ticket (I wonder how they determine that?), but after that it's basically a black box process: they handle everything for you, and you find out at the end if they were successful or not. There's also "this service is not available in the State of Georgia" in the footer, which is both interesting and suggests they've done their homework on this, since you wouldn't see a disclaimer for a market they're not even in yet if they hadn't. I'm curious why Georgia is unavailable - maybe something to do with power of attorney law there?
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
analog31 12y ago
>>> Wait until this isn't for parking tickets but rather for Social Security disability determinations or VA mid-term disability determinations or Illinois DOT public right-of-way ingress/egress waivers or... ... or criminal indictments.
- zyxley 12y ago
  At that point you're moving from bureaucratic processes to legal ones, though, and the expense skyrockets because of requirements for things like bar certifications.
chipgap98 12y ago
Something like this for speeding tickets would be fantastic. The assumption is that most people don't have the time to deal with appealing a lot of these violations. It would give the average person another good option if they decide to fight a speeding ticket.

71 points by steven 12y ago

So this whole thing reads as if it was written from the perspective of the founders of Fixed, and is a story about how great their service is. Lot of talk about Submarines[1] lately, over under on this being one? [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

larrys 12y ago
Regardless of the PR angle I found it valuable and it got me thinking of a few similar ideas. Also I don't think this compares to the "suits are making a comeback" at all in the sense that it's at least a new and unique idea ... it's not a rehash used strictly to manipulate the public.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
icelancer 12y ago
Of course this is one. Submarines make up 20-40% of all stories. Work at a news desk or cable station and you'll see it firsthand.

boxcardavin 12y ago

I've been on the numbered waitlist for Seattle for 6 months or so, it hasn't budged. Meh.

dsugarman 12y ago

huge fan, can't wait for traffic camera support across the US which is one of the biggest impediments on our 4th Amendment rights in our country's young history.

larrys 12y ago

As a concept this is a good idea and can be applied to righting other "wrongs". For example there have always been companies that will audit utility bills for companies (and possibly individuals) but they are not widely known to the general public. If you make it easy for people they would almost certainly take a snap of their utility bill and let someone else do the work in exchange for a cut of the refund. For one thing the company doing the work knows the lay of the land. They know exactly what to look for and aren't going to spin their wheels. They don't have to spend time learning. But there is another dynamic going on here as well. Similar in a way to why people do garage sales when the net revenue in many cases doesn't exceed the effort. The reason is they'd rather get $2.00 or even .50c for something rather than throwing it out. It's not about the money in other words. (Likewise you'd rather give away for free to someone rather than throwing out because to your brain that feels like karma..) With this type of service better that someone takes up your cause and allows you to feel that you did something rather than feel like a, for lack of a better way to put it, a schmuck who did nothing. I can see a wide range of possibilities for these "justice" or even "advocate" as a service ideas.

icelancer 12y ago
Definitely, you hit the nail on the head. These services are usually spearheaded by people who can make a fair bit of money, but probably not as much if they turned their efforts towards other things. But they get great satisfaction by solving a real problem - government stupidity - and that's worth a lot. Actually that explains why I am no longer a data scientist and why I work in sports science now, making 40% of my previous salary.

dfxm12 12y ago

I know of cities that seem to be working actively against its residents with arcane laws about when, where and who is allowed to park in a specific spot at a specific time, so I'm glad someone is sticking up for the little guy. However, I wish government was transparent enough that services like this weren't needed. Why do I have to take a day off from work to fight a ticket whose fee is (probably) worth less to me than a vacation day (first world problem, I know)? I think I'm also lucky enough to have lived in a few cities where I didn't feel that the parking authority is actively working against me. I've gotten many parking tickets, and I can honestly say all but one were justified... That said, I am rather fond of this quote: A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works. -Bill Vaughan

icelancer 12y ago
> However, I wish government was transparent enough that services like this weren't needed I do too, but the sooner we realize this is impossible, the sooner we can all get over it and turn the responsibilities over to third party private organizations.
- rtpg 12y ago
  I think telecoms have proven that this hypothesis doesn't hold up very well. Try unsubscribing from cable.
  - recursive 12y ago
    With cable, at least it's possible to never subscribe in the first place. That doesn't work with governments.
    - rtpg 12y ago
      don't own a car/house/etc. and you can greatly reduce your interaction surface with government. At least in France the only interaction I have with the gov't is voting, getting a letter to pay my habitation taxes, and having to renew my passport. If you think it's unreasonable to not have a car, it might be unreasonable to not have an internet connection too...

dmritard96 12y ago

“The incentives are all messed up,” says Hegarty. Cities have come to rely on parking tickets as a source of sorely needed revenue, he explains. The more parking tickets, the better the budget numbers." This also applies to them given their business model.

mikeash 12y ago
It does, but at least they don't have a conflict of interest from making, enforcing, and profiting from the rules all at once.

thrownaway2424 12y ago

Great, so now you can outsource being an asshole? This guy needs to suck it up, pay his tickets, read the signs, and stop driving and parking like a moron. Best approach for people who absolutely cannot be bothered to read and follow the rules would probably be to sell the car and join a car sharing service where the parking spaces are dedicated.

Karunamon 12y ago
That cuts both ways, you realize? The guy in the article got his tickets killed because the moronic city broke the law by not having the signage posted correctly: >Fixed came through. The startup couldn’t do anything about the street cleaning ticket, but after reviewing some Google Street View pictures of the scene of the parking ticket crime, one of Fixed’s full-time “advocates” determined that the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA) had not complied with California state law specifying where parking signage must be placed. The city needs to suck it up and follow their own laws if they're going to levy stealth taxes on people. Live by the law, die by the law.
- zippergz 12y ago
  It doesn't say he parked there because he thought it was legal due to the signs. It says he parked there because he "forgot his car." The incorrect signage was a technicality that allowed him to get out of paying the ticket.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    And? The tickets were therefore unjustified. Live by the law, die by the law.
pmorici 12y ago
Why does exercising your constitutional right for legal do process make you an asshole?
- noarchy 12y ago

patio11 12y ago

Wait until this isn't for parking tickets but rather for Social Security disability determinations or VA mid-term disability determinations or Illinois DOT public right-of-way ingress/egress waivers or... Crystallized knowledge of how to play the bureaucracy game, in a box, backed up by a pool of people you can grant e.g. Power of Attorney to is freaking brilliant. If it helps, think of it as exposing a web/mobile UI to City Hall without them having to figure out how to do that or upset stakeholders whose jobs are created by Form 213B. Except it is even bigger than that implies.

icelancer 12y ago
Please god, yes. The government will never solve its own bureaucracy. I am so willing to pay a third party to do it for me.
- xur17 12y ago
  I absolutely agree. I just moved to a new state, and I figured the process for registering my car / getting a new license would be fairly straightforward, but boy was I wrong... I would have easily paid a few bucks for a app that walks me through the process, including where I need to go, etc.
  - icelancer 12y ago
    Despite the fact that King County and Seattle are full of bureaucratic idiots who dug a tunnel that will make traffic worse and will cost 2x it's normal budget (at least), most of the city/state services are really not too bad. Online billpays are universal and rate a solid D+ for usability (pretty good for the government) and most of the local offices for DMV/DOL work are actually pretty good. Now if you have unpaid parking tickets, you are totally screwed. You have to drive downtown and fill out forms in triplicate while paying them off before you come back to your local municipality's convenient place. Why can't you do it at your local place? Who knows! But honestly that's way better than the handful of other states I've lived in, which says a lot about government services. So if that's the BEST we can do, yeah. We need these services for everything, post haste.

0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago

Still waiting for the app that enables the comeback of the meter maids.

tzs 12y ago

I don't get the tie to libertarianism the article tries to make. The service seems no more libertarian to me than any other service that provides assistance in dealing with a government agency. I wouldn't call H&R Block "libertarian", for example, for helping people minimize what they pay in taxes. Fixed is not doing anything fundamentally different from what H&R Block does--they are just dealing with a different government and different agency. I am curious about how they actually represent their clients at a traffic ticket hearing. Does traffic ticket court allow people to be represented by non-lawyers, or does Fixed send a lawyer to actual appear to contest the ticket?

Guvante 12y ago
Given their webpage says explicitly that it is not an attorney client relationship I doubt they will represent you in court. What could happen is they give you all the information you need to show up to your court date and listen to their channels for how it went.
- tzs 12y ago
  I did some searching, and apparently there are three levels of contesting an SFMTA ticket. 1. You submit your objection to the ticket and supply supporting evidence, and they accept or reject it. 2. If rejected, you can try again at an administrative hearing. 3. If that fails, you can go to Superior Court. Only #2 and #3 require the presence of you or a representative. Presumably, Fixed works at the #1 level only.

petercooper 12y ago

So I'm assuming Fixed made $76 in this case (4 x $76 tickets were dismissed, so 25% = $76) but the article says only 20-30% are actually dismissed (so only 20-30% of tickets result in income for Fixed?) and, well, it could have been a single $76 ticket with a mere $19 potential payday.. How does it financially make sense to run a company like Fixed? I'm intrigued, and probably making false assumptions, so correct me ;-)

mbesto 12y ago
Nope, you pay 10% (IIRC) of it if doesn't get dismissed. They handle that payment transaction for you, so the 10% isn't terrible considering how much of a PITA it is to try to use the metro's ticket payment system.
ianferrel 12y ago
There are probably very high fixed costs in successfully contesting tickets. You have to fill out a form. You have to understand how it works. You have to know what the laws are, and what a likely avenue to contest is. You probably have to mail or physically hand the form in. For many people, it's not worth the effort. It might be hours of work for a relatively small gain. For the company, they can catalog the institutional knowledge required, then very quickly assess whether a given ticket falls into one of the categories they know how to contest, print out the form automatically, then mail or submit them in bulk. 700 tickets a week * 0.70 contested * 0.20-.30 won * $76/ticket * .25 fee * 52 weeks = $97-145k/year revenue. Looks like they're just two founders right now, so that's not unreasonable.

jrochkind1 12y ago

You always could hire a lawyer to help you contest parking tickets, and the lawyer always (or at least for decades now) could choose to charge you on contingency only if you won. I guess what Fixed has done is figure out a way to use technology to make this business model financially feasible for the legal firm. Or at least they think they have. We'll see. Oh, except someone else in the thread says Fixed tries to tell you it's not an attorney-client relationship, so perhaps they don't have lawyers involved. I'd expect if they become succesful enough that the city doesn't like them, then, the city will try to argue that what they are doing is practicing law without a license. It's odd to me that they don't get some lawyers on staff and say, sure, it's a legal service; have to think through what the problems for their business would be there, not sure, but maybe the challenges of complying with legal standards for legal services are riskier than then the threat of someone succesfully arguing you practicing law without a license. Presumably they their own legal advice on their business model, for the business where they say they aren't giving their customers legal advice. Or is it just another Uber approach "If we get succesful enough, we can convince people that existing laws don't apply if you make an app... cause... internet?"

zyxley 12y ago
I'm guessing their power of attorney is (despite the name) specifically constructed so that they're acting directly as a proxy for you rather than in the capacity of of a lawyer. It's organized by a company, but the intent seems to be for it be legally identical to you paying a friend who knows city hall really well to go go send in some forms for you. There's no legal advice involved, too, as far as I can tell. They give you a percentage chance of successfully fighting the ticket (I wonder how they determine that?), but after that it's basically a black box process: they handle everything for you, and you find out at the end if they were successful or not. There's also "this service is not available in the State of Georgia" in the footer, which is both interesting and suggests they've done their homework on this, since you wouldn't see a disclaimer for a market they're not even in yet if they hadn't. I'm curious why Georgia is unavailable - maybe something to do with power of attorney law there?
- jrochkind1 12y ago

analog31 12y ago

>>> Wait until this isn't for parking tickets but rather for Social Security disability determinations or VA mid-term disability determinations or Illinois DOT public right-of-way ingress/egress waivers or... ... or criminal indictments.

zyxley 12y ago
At that point you're moving from bureaucratic processes to legal ones, though, and the expense skyrockets because of requirements for things like bar certifications.

chipgap98 12y ago

Something like this for speeding tickets would be fantastic. The assumption is that most people don't have the time to deal with appealing a lot of these violations. It would give the average person another good option if they decide to fight a speeding ticket.