Up Against the Wall, Meter Maid!
A San Francisco startup liberates users from the oppression of parking tickets
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One lousy day in September, San Francisco resident Mark Wolff discovered he had parked his car in the wrong place — for two straight days. Five separate envelopes glared up at him from under his windshield wiper — a $66 dollar spanking for obstructing street cleaning, and four $76 tickets for violating residential “overtime” rules.
Ouch! $370 in fines because he got busy and “forgot his car.” Normally, says Wolff, he’s the kind of guy who pays all his tickets on time, but this was just “too much.”
Wolff may have parked in the wrong place, but he happened to live in the right city. Because in 2014, help is on the way for inhabitants of San Francisco loath to let big bureaucracies push them around. Wolff turned to the Internet, and soon found exactly what he was looking for — an iPhone app called Fixed.
Fixed’s value proposition is simple. If the company thinks there’s a valid reason for contesting your ticket, they’ll do it for you. If they win, you pay 25 percent of the original fine. Fixed had good reviews in the app store, said Wolff, so he thought it was worth a shot. He downloaded the app, input his credit card information, and uploaded pictures of his tickets.
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. Fixed successfully contested the tickets. Wolff was happy to have his credit card docked for the requisite 25 percent. “It was totally worth it,” he says.
Welcome to Silicon Valley’s newest business model: “justice as a service” — the next evolutionary step in the tech economy’s relentless focus on consumer satisfaction. When life is unfair, when The Man is getting you down, don’t just grin and bear it, and don’t give up! All you need is the right app. It’s a concept both libertarians and social justice warriors may be able to find common cause on. Everyone knows the “system” is broken. So why not give your smartphone a chance to fix it?
“Parking tickets,” says David Hegarty, Fixed’s co-founder, “are a very emotive issue.”
36 years old, with only a trace of his native Irish brogue remaining after more than a decade in the United States, Hegarty epitomizes the “scratch-your-own-itch” stereotype of the California tech startup entrepreneur. In 2009, he quit his job at Microsoft and moved from Seattle to San Francisco. In 2010, he started three different companies, but failed to gain significant traction with any of them. (Snapdragon, a product check-in iPhone game featuring a sarcastic pink dragon, got the cold shoulder at TechCrunch Disrupt). In between business ideas, he paid the rent by consulting for the ride-sharing startup Sidecar. And although he says that as “a matter of principle” he’d always been resolute about contesting every single parking ticket, he ended up so busy consulting that he let four tickets accumulate to the point he decided he had no option but to pay them all off at once.
But after paying his fines online during a morning spent at Starbucks, he returned home in the afternoon to find two more tickets on his car.
“I was livid,” he recalls. “And I’m bitching and moaning to a friend about this, and he’s like, ‘why don’t you turn that into your iPhone app?’”
Suddenly, the personal became political. Because Hegarty doesn’t merely find parking tickets irksome; he sees them as fraught with social dysfunction, as bad social policy judged from the perspectives of both the right and left ends of the political spectrum.
The libertarian angle is easy to grasp. Overzealous parking enforcement is an apt symbol for the infringement of personal liberty by the grasping hands of big government.
“The incentives are all messed up,” says Hegarty. Cities have come to rely on parking tickets as a source of sorely needed revenue, he explains. The more parking tickets, the better the budget numbers.
“If you give a loss-generating organization such as the SFMTA the right to a questionable revenue stream where it acts as judge, jury and beneficiary without oversight,” says Hegarty. “You’re going to have egregious abuses of power.”
But even if you are more liberal-minded, and accept parking tickets as an environmentally positive tax redistributing cash extracted from car owners into the city’s public transit system, there’s still reason to be critical.
Hegarty is not alone in viewing parking tickets as a regressive tax that targets the poor and ignores the rich. The people who end up paying street sweeping tickets every other week are people who can’t afford garages. A free smartphone app, at least in theory, is a way to balance the scales.
“Have you ever been to the impound lot in San Francisco? “ Hegarty asks me. “It can cost $600–700 to get your car back. That could be the car you need to get to your job, or perform your job.”
One thing is for sure: San Francisco is very serious about its parking enforcement. According to Priceonomics, San Francisco’s average parking ticket fee ranks the highest for any U.S. city. If you combine meter revenue with parking ticket revenue, San Francisco collects around $130 million a year from parking — revenue which goes straight into the black hole of the MUNI budget.
So is it any wonder that at Y Combinator’s Demo Day in August, Fixed’s presentation was greeted with rapturous applause? An app that taps into Silicon Valley’s libertarian sympathies and simultaneously can make a case for standing up for the little guy checks some powerful boxes. In October, Hegarty told me Fixed was processing an impressive 700 tickets a week. The company contests 70–80 percent of those tickets, he says, and ultimately gets about 20–30 percent of them dismissed.
Right now, Fixed only operates in San Francisco, and is still in the process of completing its “canonical taxonomy of parking violations.” But Hegarty says the plan is to move into a hundred more U.S. cities next year. And parking tickets are only the thin end of the “justice as a service” wedge. Hegarty wants to add speeding tickets and other moving violations to the list of services available through Fixed, and eventually, expand into a much wider domain — bogus credit card charges or cable television fees.
An app that helps you contest the unfairness of your Comcast bill? Pull that off, and you will get statues erected of you on Main Street.
Hegarty says that when he tells his old friends back in Ireland what he’s up to, they laugh and are completely unsurprised. Dating back to his early childhood, Hegarty says he was well-known for a strong sense of dissatisfaction with anything he deemed as “unfair.” Now he’s translated his beef with irresponsible authority into a business.
“You’ve basically been dicked over by the man as a consumer, and it’s hard to know what to do,” says Hegarty. “We’re going to take general consumer advocacy, turn it into a system, and then automate that system.”
The term “justice as a service” was coined by Denmark native Nicholas Michaelsen, co-founder of AirHelp, another startup that recently graduated from the Y Combinator seed accelerator.
Airhelp assists air travelers in getting refunds for cancelled or delayed flights. Michaelsen says the company was searching for a way to explain their business model of “representing the customer in a fight for justice based on their consumer rights.”
“We’re using technology to help people assert what is rightfully theirs,” says Michaelsen. “It’s a logical progression from the consumer empowerment that social media gave consumers. The difference is that social media just gave you a megaphone to scream out loud, and call out a company, but you weren’t actually able to change the situation you were in.”
Since coining the phrase in 2013, Michaelsen says he’s been pleased to see the concept become a “movement.”
“There’s so many ways that this could be applied,” says Michaelsen. “Mis-sold insurance policies, over-reaching government agencies”
So what do the government agencies in question think?
Paul Rose, a spokesperson for the SFMTA, says that Fixed’s business operations have become “noticeable.”
“In fact, we are using considerable resources to respond to each records request,” says Rose, though he also said “we do not have concerns if people want to use a third party service.”
Rose says the city has no quotas encouraging parking enforcement. To the contrary, over the past few years, he says citations have actually decreased 12 percent.
“The reason we issue citations is to enforce the rules of the road to ensure safety, to ensure parking turnover and to ease congestion,” says Rose. “Over the last several years we’ve seen our citation rates decrease because we have implemented tools that make parking easier, including longer time limits, paying by cell phone, and allowing for the usage of cash and credits cards for payment. We’d much rather have people pay the meter than pay a fine.”
According to SFMTA statistics, Rose said, the general public also has a higher success rate at getting tickets dismissed (28 percent) than Fixed, (20 percent.)
When the L.A. Times first reported the SFMTA’s figures in May, Hegarty was quoted accusing the agency of “willfully discriminating against our contests” and threatening legal action against city. When I followed up with Hegarty on this point, noting he had not mentioned any significant bad blood between the city and Fixed in our initial interview, he told me he had been misquoted.
“What I actually said is ‘we make all our contests on a point of the parking code. The SFMTA has a strict interpretation of the parking code when issuing tickets, and a very loose interpretation of what the parking code says is a valid ticket.’ But the punchline is still the same: ‘yes, unless the SFMTA starts following the letter of the law, we will explore all remedies including legal action.’”
The emergence of an adversarial relationship between the “justice as a service” startup models and government agencies raises some interesting questions, says Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland whose forthcoming book, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms Behind Money & Information takes a hard look at the automation of “judgment.” Pasquale suggests that the rise of such services will prompt a kind of game theory counter-reaction from their targets.
“Hacking the justice system strikes me as potentially destructive,” says Pasquale. “Let’s say that somehow this app figures out how to sandbag the parking authority over and over again. Well then, the authority is probably going to expand the list of things they go after. You could reach an equilibrium where it’s not really better for either consumers or the agency — it’s only better for the app maker in the middle.
“With the growing take up of smartphones, there may well be a way for people to challenge the state’s tickets, or the harsh polices of airlines,” Pasquale continued. “That could be a positive thing. But there are going to be countermeasures by the people who run the traffic authority or the airline. You may end up with an out-of-control arms race, in which one side automates its response and the other retaliates by responding to the automation.”
Certainly, its hard to imagine the likes of Comcast standing idly by if third party services like Fixed emerge to help consumers challenge unfair billing practices. And as Fixed expands its operations into more complicated domains, it will inevitably become entangled with the legal system — something that Hegarty doesn’t seem too eager to do. If you have commited an actual crime, for example, a smartphone app might not be the best substitute for a good defense lawyer. But judging by the enthusiasm with which San Francisco’s residents have embraced Fixed, a justice-as-a-service arms race seems inevitable. If there really proves to be a sustainable business model in using your smartphone to battle bureaucracies, the masses will happily participate.
Photos by Stephen Lam
