
Fixed, App That Fixes Parking Tickets, Gets Blocked in SF, Oakland and L.A - confiscate
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/12/fixed-the-app-that-fixes-your-parking-tickets-gets-blocked-in-san-francisco-oakland-l-a/#.6qjorz:NOCH
======
Spivak
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?

~~~
dougmccune
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.

~~~
davidhegarty
I'm just going to quickly jump in here. I'm David, one of the co-founders of
Fixed.

Every single contest is custom written, and has an extremely thorough review
which includes: 1) automated check (check for missing/incorrect information)
2) low level review (primarily done by a team in India that uses Google Street
view to measure the distance to closest signs) 3) high level review (performed
by an Advocate in SF who double check the previous steps, and also reviews all
notes and input from the user).

The advocate in SF then finalizes the contest letter and submits.

In general, about 2/3 of the tickets issued by the SFMTA and other parking
ticket authorities have some issue with them.

I'd also like to point out, that it is not in our interest to submit frivolous
contests. Each submitted contest requires time and resources on our end to
submit the contest AND monitor the contest and process the return letter.

Finally... if your wife had two similar contest submitted, I might suggest
that the SFMTA has become fat and lazy from lack of oversight, and continues
to make the same trivial mistakes in each ticket.

~~~
dougmccune
> I might suggest that the SFMTA has become fat and lazy from lack of
> oversight, and continues to make the same trivial mistakes in each ticket.

I'm having a hard time understanding how this isn't confirmation of exactly
what I experienced and described. I'm sure there are lots of minor
trivialities that might get filled out slightly wrong a decent percentage of
the time, none of which have anything to do with the validity of the ticket.
So if you know all the tiny trivial loopholes you have a decent chance of
finding something done "wrong" for otherwise perfectly appropriate tickets.

So yeah, you're able to point out the tiniest unimportant mistakes on a
parking citation and then take advantage of that flaw in the system to get
people out of valid tickets. It's impressive I suppose, but not something I'd
personally brag about.

~~~
davidhegarty
That's not how laws work. You can't have one set of rules for one stakeholder,
and another set of rules for another. Particularly when one of those
stakeholders gets to acts as enforcement, judiciary AND beneficiary.

1 inch over the curb... we're going to tow your car with $700 worth of fines.

No visible sign on the street and nothing within 100 ft (which there has to be
by law)... it doesn't matter, you should have known we intended that street to
have no parking between 4-6pm.

If you tried to come up with a system with more adverse and broken incentives,
you'd be hard pushed to come up with a better one than the SFMTA. 1) Let's
saddle this organization with $10Ms of losses each year. 2) Let's give them
the authority to issue tickets and fine the citizens for breaking an arbitrary
set of laws. 3) Let's allow them keep the fines and treat it as 'revenue'. 4)
Let's allows them to regulate themselves and decided if the tickets they
issued are fair.

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mc32
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
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.

~~~
deathanatos
> _-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._

…except that Walgreens is able to make adding value happen instantly… somehow.

~~~
jcrawfordor
The cards are stored-value - meaning that the card actually stores how much
money it is worth. For cost saving and legacy reasons, most Clipper readers
are offline and simply read and update the card value.

When you add value online, there is no way for the service to write to your
card, so instead Clipper terminals throughout the system are informed of the
value add and apply it next time they interact with your card. Online
terminals, e.g. most vending machines, frequently synchronize with the online
service and can transfer value added online almost immediately. Offline
readers like those on buses, though, obtain a batched list of online value
adds from time to time, often in the bus yard overnight via short range
wireless networking - but in some areas this may happen less frequently than
once a day. For Muni, I believe it should always happen overnight.

When you add value at Walgreen's, they set your card on a terminal that
updates it directly.

This limitation is common to all stored value systems with offline terminals,
including all Cubic transit card systems such as Clipper, Oyster, SmarTrip,
etc. It's a compromise involved in rolling such a system out to a vehicle
network without the expense of long range radio networking in every terminal -
these systems were designed and implemented well before this was practical.

~~~
jcrawfordor
As a side note, design of offline systems that would generally be online is an
interesting problem. For example, Onity/TESA door locks store an incrementing
counter for determining the validity of keys. If you need to revoke a key, you
make a new key with a higher counter value and insert it in each lock. When
the lock sees a larger number, it increments its internal counter, and the old
key will then have too small of a number and not work.

What's even trickier is when you want thorough logging. Clipper terminals
report back card usage information when they update on value adds. Some locks
struggle with this - for Onity locks, retrieving user history requires
connecting a bulky diagnostic device to the lock. An interesting solution is
that used by Cyberlock. In that system, an audit log is stored in the key
itself and the key has a short expiry, forcing the holder to frequently
reprogram it, during which the log is retrieved. The locks must still store a
log too in case of disappearing keys, but it allows for fairly accurate
logging without frequently having to visit every lock.

------
gkoberger
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
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
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
In New York, they put a boot on your car after a while. Or tow it. And then it
becomes more expensive.

~~~
imaginenore
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.

------
stevesearer
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
I can't even remember a parking ticket I got that wasn't my fault.

~~~
swang
I can. And my options were:

Fight it and risk losing anyway and wasting a day defending myself. In LA and
OC you also have to prepay the ticket and then they refund if you "win". Oh
btw they also charge fees to defend yourself.

Just eat the cost of a 45 ticket.

I was just starting my first job but this was before this new boom so I didn't
get paid a whole bunch. But I can see why tickets are considered a tax on the
poor. If you get hit with one and you don't make enough $$$. You are fucked.

Even though I could afford to just pay the 45 ticket it ate away at me that I
didn't fight it. Why am I being punished when I am pretty certain the meter
maid didn't even know the law?

~~~
majormajor
Thankfully the pay-to-play has been changed going forward, at least:
[http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-traffic-
fines-...](http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-traffic-
fines-20150608-story.html)

I can see the "tax on the poor" argument on one hand, but on the other hand
permit parking areas are soooo much nicer to live in than playing a parking
lottery every night, if you don't have on-site parking. And that wouldn't work
without enforcement. I'm not in favor of free parking for all, there just
isn't enough public road space out here.

~~~
swang
I'm glad they're ending pay-to-play, and that article shows why it's terrible.

I am not really sure permit parking violations and tax on the poor are one or
the other. Most people who are poor are not worried about tickets caused by
permit parking violations more being randomly stopped for fixit tickets and
the like. Again pay-to-play being taken out is a great first step. And there's
just no real balanced way to handle this and thus the lawmakers balance the
odds in their favor rather than the people they serve.

------
swang
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
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
Sorry, I meant "parking fines". Mobile auto-correct...

"Parking fonts" must just be extremely hard to read fonts especially for no
parking signs!

------
pbreit
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
>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
>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
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.

~~~
comrh
Ah I misunderstood, I thought it was OCR.

------
zanzibarstander
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
> 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_
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
>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_
I'm not saying you need to be a lawyer to do what Fixed is doing, just that
the question of "would you hire a lawyer for X" isn't the way to argue that
point. Because there are people who would get their lawyer to deal with it,
and there are also people who would go into serious legal battles and defend
themselves without hiring a lawyer.

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

