Or is this about "I park wherever I want and try to avoid the consequences"?
So far it seems that most of the customers are of the latter variety. While I understand the motivation to act like an asshole, this service empowers .. assholes?
We're regularly discussing if free apps (downward spiral) or free content (adblockers) are okay. But free parking is fine, right?
Ironically my objection to this service is essentially the opposite of yours. I see this app as imposing a middleman's fee on something that, in a perfect world, citizens would be able to perform themselves with the same probability of success. Contesting an illegitimate parking or speeding ticket is a fairly straightforward matter, but in my (personal) experience, unless you bring a lawyer to the courtroom your arguments will simply be ignored. In my area, the courts do not even keep records, so you can't use the judge's blatant dismissal of your concerns* as grounds for a mistrial on appeal.
Maybe I'm not understanding how the service works, but I see this service as simply a specialized and cheaper lawyer replacement. Maybe that's progress since you can actually save some money if you win, but you're still paying a more powerful entity in order to get respect in a court of law.
*I've literally been told by a judge, "stop speaking now, your turn is over" seconds after showing that the officer didn't use a LIDAR gun correctly per the manual, and upon cross examination didn't even know the type of device he was using (Me: "Were you using a radar or a laser based device on <date> at <time>?" Officer: "I was using the device the department issued me." Right afterwards: "Me: If you don't know what kind of device you were using, how can you know the effective range of the device?" Officer: "I believe it was effective and accurate when I used it."). The judge repeatedly referred to it as a "LASAR" device...
But from where I'm standing, you either park correctly or risk a ticket. In fact, this country here just raised the minimum amount for parking offenses because people did the math and found out that in some cases a ticket was cheaper than paying (parking ground, whatever).
So in my (certainly subjective, shaped, hardly applicable to the service at hand) world view you're just not fighting tickets. You either don't get them or you risked to get them. Exceptions exist, but are a teeny, tiny fraction and wouldn't be enough to keep a service like this afloat.
Could I be totally wrong: Sure.
For example- this summer I was living in Brooklyn. I filled up my motorcycle and pulled out of a gas station. Within maybe 500-600 feet I got pulled over. I had no idea at all why, as I certainly wasn't speeding or doing anything even moderately questionable.
I got a $100 'equipment violation' ticket for having the visor on my helmet opened by 2 inches so I could get some air flow in slow traffic. I wasn't wearing my glasses that day, and had contacts in instead. I've quite literally never had a moving violation before, and I'm a relatively careful driver especially in city traffic.
I was told that this ticket was for my safety. Keep in mind I was wearing armored boot, pants, jacket, gloves that covered me past my wrists and an excellent helmet.
I comparison, the NYPD often wear almost no protection (see this photo: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/NYPD-Moto...). As you can see, they don't have full-face helmets, those jackets and pants certainly aren't armored and their gloves don't go very far down. Oh, and no eye protection.
I simply paid the ticket, as the ticket had stiff language on it saying that if I contested it that they could increase the fines/fees significantly, and frankly I didn't have the time to go through NYC bureaucracy.
The cop admitted to me that he wouldn't have normally pulled me over, but they were doing 'motorcycle enforcement' (aka. quota) and they had to pull over anyone for anything.
Yes, it can be used to easily dispute bad parking tickets. But the reason it works is that an office somewhere is pumping out boilerplate with your name on it at a faster rate than the courts have time to deal with it — this is the reason so many tickets get dismissed, because our court system is already so overtaxed that it must decide rather peremptorily on minor topics like this.
In other words they're basically doing a paper denial-of-service attack on the courts, which as they do not have the capacity to do all these hearings, simply default to halving or nixing the ticket. Personally, I think it is vile.
As someone who has had to deal with both illegitimately issued traffic and parking citations, I think its brilliant.
Traffic tickets and parking tickets, for the most part, are for revenue and not safety. If they were for safety or actual enforcement, the punishments wouldn't be so heavily weighted towards fines.
Anytime technology can stick a wrench in poor government, be it incompetent civil servants, or poor policy, I'm all for it. If you don't have the capacity to provide hearings that are allowed by law, don't issue the citations.
I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I disagree with your argument.
Any punishment other than a fine for parking or speeding violations would be draconian, except for repeat offenders.
It's not OK to throw someone in jail or suspend their license (potentially removing their ability to get to work) for a minor speeding violation.
Agreed. At the same time, this would entail correcting law enforcement of speed limits to be more realistic, with other traffic citations directing you to remedial training/driving school that is affordable and not profit driven.
Self-driving cars make all this moot though. The sooner they get here, the better.
Meter broken? Happens. Curb paint faded? Doesn't apply here (That's something that works a little different), but I have a hard time seeing that being a _common_ reason. Really. Common sense and remains of paint would probably be enough. Missing signs: Seems to be too big of a deal. In my world there's no way you can hand out tickets without having signs in place. You'd be contested again and again even without this service and would stop that behavior - or put up signs. This is not a temporary failure or a result of decay.
And then there's the 'meter times unclear' or 'other' part. Again, if this is trying to fight unfair tickets I'm a huge fan. It just doesn't look like that and the comments here seem to be mostly 'Yeah, where do I sign up to get that ticket removed'.
I .. park where I'm allowed to park, search a parking spot if I'm not sure OR (last time: 2 weeks back) risk a ticket and pay it if I get one. I guess I lack the empathy for people that have a different way here..
As for things like faded curb paint and missing signs and so on, that's not an excuse the operator of the vehicle can use. Even if there's no red curb paint here, you're still not allowed to park within 30 feet of an intersection (on the direction-of-travel side) or 10 feet of a fireplug or 5 feet of a driveway. Those are all things you're expected to know by virtue of having a driver license. Now, being ticketed for being over-time on a free parking stretch that's limited to 2 hours when the sign has gone missing might be one thing, but the folks around here put up so many signs in so many places, I think a person would have a hard time making that stand up.
Ultimately: if someone isn't sure and wants to not risk incurring the fine, he or she shouldn't leave a hunk of metal and plastic sitting on the public right-of-way.
Suddenly it's up to you as the defendant to prove that that wasn't the case.
Outside of completely bogus tickets, proving that they were technically allowed to write the ticket is a trivial affair for the authorities.
Even at 50% probability of successfully contesting a ticket, it's still much cheaper to find a parking meter and pay for parking. Or pay for two taxi rides. Or, if you're one of the above mentioned wealthy people, hire a full time driver.
On the other hand, there are plenty of instances where people are unfairly penalized for badly signposted regulations, faded paint (especially red in the dark lit by low-pressure sodium), regulations only a local would reasonably know about, or even broken meters. There is a high cost in personal time to contesting these. I think this is a problem which may be solved quite well by this app.