One of the less enjoyable parts of living in a city comes when you go to your car and see a brightly colored parking ticket envelope slapped onto your windshield. Sure you can always contest your parking tickets but doing so means you’ll have to waste a lot of time filling out paperwork or going into traffic court. This is one reason why a lot of parking tickets simply go unchallenged.
CNN reports that a new mobile app called Fixed is set to launch next week that will try to take away a lot of the pain you go through when it comes to challenging parking tickets. The app lets you take a picture of your parking ticket and then take pictures of any evidence that you have to support your case that the ticket should never have been issued. Evidence you can use to overturn your ticket through Fixed includes broken parking meters, meters that don’t display their times clearly, faded curb paint and signs that are either missing or confusing.
From there, Fixed’s in-house team of traffic law experts will look at your case and give you an estimate of your chances of getting the ticket dismissed. If you want to go ahead with your challenge, Fixed will file paperwork on your behalf and generally try to put you in the best position possible to beat the rap. If you successfully get your ticket tossed out, you’ll have to pay Fixed 25% of what the original citation would have cost you. If you don’t win your case then Fixed charges you nothing.
“When you mention parking tickets to people it engenders such an emotional reaction … because so many people think they’ve received an unfair parking ticket,” says Fixed co-founder David Hegarty, who also tells CNN that he got the inspiration to start Fixed after he got a whopping six different parking tickets in one day.
All things told, Fixed looks like the best way to use technology to help you fight parking citations, at least until Google’s self-driving cars are smart enough to do all the work for you.
