Hate Parking Tickets? Fixed Is The Amazing New App That Will Help You Dispute Them
Let’s face it, if you drive a car in basically any major American city, parking is an enormous pain.
Sometimes it seems far more appealing to walk five miles in the blistering heat of summer than it does to drive, as driving involves the headache-inducing search for a parking space.
Everyone has been through this scenario.
You arrive at your destination only to find that there are no spaces available, and you have to drive around for another 20 minutes looking. Sometimes you find a spot only to realize that there isn’t enough space for you to parallel park, or there is street sweeping on that specific day during those specific hours and your car will be towed… The agony.
Even if you do find a legal spot you can fit in, you might have forgotten change for the meter and you don’t have service so your phone can’t download the parking app that lets you pay via credit card.
Plain and simple, parking sucks, and often leads to a number of tickets, which most of us can’t afford.
Ultimately, the majority of us often end up paying the ticket, figuring that contesting it would be too much of a hassle. If you’re under that impression, you’re wrong.
David Hegarty and DJ Burdick cofounded Fixed last year to help people dispute their parking tickets. At one point, Hegarty received five parking tickets in three weeks, and although he knew how to successfully contest his tickets, many of his friends were not privy to the same information.
In an interview with Business Insider, Hegarty stated,
I'm a stickler for protesting all my parking tickets… I really think it's a racket by the city. It's become a form of revenue. When you start giving officers quotas, people lose respect for the [authorities issuing] parking tickets.
He has a point. There is almost nothing more infuriating than a parking ticket when you’ve only parked somewhere for a few minutes and you’re in an enormous hurry.
Well, now there’s no reason to be angry anymore. If you get a parking ticket, relax, take a deep breath and use Fixed.
Fixed is an amazingly simple app. Basically, all you have to do is take a picture of your recent parking ticket and upload it onto the app. The Fixed team will analyze it for errors, as police sometimes forget to fill out mandatory line items.
Business Insider notes,
The startup also uses Google Street View to look at signage where tickets are issued; if a parking sign can't be seen by a reasonably observant person, tickets can often be waived.
According to its website, Fixed has a team comprised of experts who know the parking rules inside-out. Moreover, as the website states, up to 50 percent of tickets are dismissed when challenged. So, about two seconds of effort could mean saving a substantial amount of money, not to mention sticking it to the man.
The app charges 25 percent of the fine if you win, and if you lose, the ticket is paid for via pre-uploaded credit card info. Not surprisingly, it has been incredibly successful, and lauded by Square founder Jack Dorsey as well as Ivanka Trump.
Hegarty hopes to expand the app to the nation’s top 100 cities within the next two years. In places like Washington DC and New York City, this app could alleviate a great deal of stress for millions of drivers.
Fixed is a fantastic example of technology being utilized to help common people save time and money. American cities gain an exorbitant amount of revenue from parking tickets, and more often than not tickets are thoroughly undeserved.
There are a lot of times where the little guy gets screwed… For most people it’s really hard to fight [a big company] the first time...That’s a perfect problem to get solved by software.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock
