Fixed, the App That Fixes Your Parking Tickets, Gets Blocked in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles

Sarah Perez, reporting for TechCrunch:

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. (When the company won, it charged a success fee of 25% of the original fine — a reduction in what a customer would have otherwise paid.) […]

Of course, the cities haven’t been welcoming to an app that was aimed at helping locals not pay their tickets by automating the process of jumping through legal loopholes. When Fixed began faxing its submissions to SFMTA last year, the agency emailed the startup to stop using their fax machine. When Fixed pointed out that it was legal to do so, the agency simply shut off their fax.

Pretty telling that rather than close the loopholes or stop handing out erroneous tickets, they unplugged their fax machine and added captchas to block Fixed. Municipal parking is a cesspool of corruption.

★ Wednesday, 14 October 2015