Fix a Parking Ticket? There's an App for That
medium.com
medium.com
Crystallized knowledge of how to play the bureaucracy game, in a box, backed up by a pool of people you can grant e.g. Power of Attorney to is freaking brilliant. If it helps, think of it as exposing a web/mobile UI to City Hall without them having to figure out how to do that or upset stakeholders whose jobs are created by Form 213B. Except it is even bigger than that implies.
Crazy.
http://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to-g...
But honestly that's way better than the handful of other states I've lived in, which says a lot about government services. So if that's the BEST we can do, yeah. We need these services for everything, post haste.
However, I wish government was transparent enough that services like this weren't needed. Why do I have to take a day off from work to fight a ticket whose fee is (probably) worth less to me than a vacation day (first world problem, I know)? I think I'm also lucky enough to have lived in a few cities where I didn't feel that the parking authority is actively working against me. I've gotten many parking tickets, and I can honestly say all but one were justified...
That said, I am rather fond of this quote:
A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works. -Bill Vaughan
I do too, but the sooner we realize this is impossible, the sooner we can all get over it and turn the responsibilities over to third party private organizations.
At least in France the only interaction I have with the gov't is voting, getting a letter to pay my habitation taxes, and having to renew my passport.
If you think it's unreasonable to not have a car, it might be unreasonable to not have an internet connection too...
Also I don't think this compares to the "suits are making a comeback" at all in the sense that it's at least a new and unique idea ... it's not a rehash used strictly to manipulate the public.
For example there have always been companies that will audit utility bills for companies (and possibly individuals) but they are not widely known to the general public.
If you make it easy for people they would almost certainly take a snap of their utility bill and let someone else do the work in exchange for a cut of the refund.
For one thing the company doing the work knows the lay of the land. They know exactly what to look for and aren't going to spin their wheels. They don't have to spend time learning.
But there is another dynamic going on here as well. Similar in a way to why people do garage sales when the net revenue in many cases doesn't exceed the effort. The reason is they'd rather get $2.00 or even .50c for something rather than throwing it out. It's not about the money in other words. (Likewise you'd rather give away for free to someone rather than throwing out because to your brain that feels like karma..)
With this type of service better that someone takes up your cause and allows you to feel that you did something rather than feel like a, for lack of a better way to put it, a schmuck who did nothing.
I can see a wide range of possibilities for these "justice" or even "advocate" as a service ideas.
Actually that explains why I am no longer a data scientist and why I work in sports science now, making 40% of my previous salary.
I wouldn't call H&R Block "libertarian", for example, for helping people minimize what they pay in taxes. Fixed is not doing anything fundamentally different from what H&R Block does--they are just dealing with a different government and different agency.
I am curious about how they actually represent their clients at a traffic ticket hearing. Does traffic ticket court allow people to be represented by non-lawyers, or does Fixed send a lawyer to actual appear to contest the ticket?
What could happen is they give you all the information you need to show up to your court date and listen to their channels for how it went.
1. You submit your objection to the ticket and supply supporting evidence, and they accept or reject it.
2. If rejected, you can try again at an administrative hearing.
3. If that fails, you can go to Superior Court.
Only #2 and #3 require the presence of you or a representative. Presumably, Fixed works at the #1 level only.
This also applies to them given their business model.
I guess what Fixed has done is figure out a way to use technology to make this business model financially feasible for the legal firm. Or at least they think they have. We'll see.
Oh, except someone else in the thread says Fixed tries to tell you it's not an attorney-client relationship, so perhaps they don't have lawyers involved. I'd expect if they become succesful enough that the city doesn't like them, then, the city will try to argue that what they are doing is practicing law without a license. It's odd to me that they don't get some lawyers on staff and say, sure, it's a legal service; have to think through what the problems for their business would be there, not sure, but maybe the challenges of complying with legal standards for legal services are riskier than then the threat of someone succesfully arguing you practicing law without a license.
Presumably they their own legal advice on their business model, for the business where they say they aren't giving their customers legal advice. Or is it just another Uber approach "If we get succesful enough, we can convince people that existing laws don't apply if you make an app... cause... internet?"
There's no legal advice involved, too, as far as I can tell. They give you a percentage chance of successfully fighting the ticket (I wonder how they determine that?), but after that it's basically a black box process: they handle everything for you, and you find out at the end if they were successful or not.
There's also "this service is not available in the State of Georgia" in the footer, which is both interesting and suggests they've done their homework on this, since you wouldn't see a disclaimer for a market they're not even in yet if they hadn't. I'm curious why Georgia is unavailable - maybe something to do with power of attorney law there?
How does it financially make sense to run a company like Fixed? I'm intrigued, and probably making false assumptions, so correct me ;-)
For many people, it's not worth the effort. It might be hours of work for a relatively small gain.
For the company, they can catalog the institutional knowledge required, then very quickly assess whether a given ticket falls into one of the categories they know how to contest, print out the form automatically, then mail or submit them in bulk.
700 tickets a week * 0.70 contested * 0.20-.30 won * $76/ticket * .25 fee * 52 weeks = $97-145k/year revenue.
Looks like they're just two founders right now, so that's not unreasonable.
... or criminal indictments.
>Fixed came through. The startup couldn’t do anything about the street cleaning ticket, but after reviewing some Google Street View pictures of the scene of the parking ticket crime, one of Fixed’s full-time “advocates” determined that the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA) had not complied with California state law specifying where parking signage must be placed.
The city needs to suck it up and follow their own laws if they're going to levy stealth taxes on people.
Live by the law, die by the law.
Live by the law, die by the law.
It doesn't, of course. There are those, however, who are under the mistaken impression that all parking tickets that are issued are justified. Thus if you contest it, you're creating extra costs for the city and should feel bad about it. I happen to disagree with them.
If an online merchant mistakenly lists an item for 1% of what it's worth by misplacing a decimal point and I buy it for 99% off, did I steal it? Would they be within their rights to cancel the order? It's not immediately clear to me.
What if everything was properly marked but someone stole the sign? Clearly he shouldn't be held accountable and the city should be forced to not only drop it but also correct the missing signage problem. But in that case the city isn't obviously wrong to ticket him in the first place; unless knowing the ins and outs of all the relevant laws is the base level of expectation for the people writing these tickets. I'd like it to be, but experience suggests that I'm a fool for wishing for that.
In any case, the courts are the final arbiter of the rules. They decide what is and isn't legal. Since he got these tickets dismissed, that means that he was within the intent or the letter or whatever part matters of the law.
For your hypothetical case of a accidental 99% sale, if the case went to court and the judge rendered a verdict, you'd have an ironclad answer to your question of who was right, legally speaking. Here, it did go to court and the judge did render a verdict, so we don't have to wonder.