4 ms·
Wait until this isn't for parking tickets but rather for Social Security disability determinations or VA mid-term disability determinations or Illinois DOT publ
by 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 agoPlease 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 agoI 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 agoDespite 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.
- scott_karana 12y agoSo, let me get this straight. A byzantine, monetarily burdensome system is so overwhelming that we should institute and pay yet another system to "solve" the problem? Crazy.
- twoodfin 12y agoThe point is that it shifts the incentives: Previously, only a few cranks would contest parking tickets—everyone else would either pay them or ignore them—so issuing them had essentially no bureaucratic cost. Now, if every citizen with a smartphone can make work for someone behind a desk at City Hall, there's a substantially greater impulse to set parking enforcement policy in a way that's fair and likely to survive scrutiny.
- Meekro 12y agoI hope that's what happens! The alternative is, they'll just raise taxes and hire more people to sit behind desks at City Hall.
- derobert 12y agoThat's not the only incentive, unfortunately. The folks fixing tickets would like there to be more invalid tickets issued; that's how they make money. Worry about winding up with something line how Intuit (TurboTax) lobbies against the IRS making tax filing easier. http://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to-grassroots-campaign-against-free-simple-tax-filing http://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to-g...
- icelancer 12y agoWell, yes. Unfortunately. I mean it's definitely "wrong" that the government sucks. As a fellow libertarian-sympathizer, I totally understand. But instead of beating our heads against the wall, we probably have to just suck it up on certain issues. This is definitely one of them.
- lumpypua 12y agoTo paraphrase, all problems can be solved by another level of indirection.