The Trouble with Tickets
Why the parking, permitting and payment process needs a new user experience
There’s a special kind of panic that strikes upon seeing a scrap of paper on your windshield, flapping spitefully in the breeze.
For my friend Marc, a 24-year-old Texan transplant who just moved to San Francisco by way of New York, it’s been a frustratingly familiar sight. Learning the parking laws has been daunting for someone who grew up driving in suburbia, then abandoned cars in favor of the subway, and is now trying to make sense of a commute that demands a hybridized approach.
Recently, Marc showed me his violations, which have been piling up due in part to not yet having a residential parking permit. He has about 15, each one averaging around $70, for a grand total of nearly a thousand bucks.
One thousand dollars. Within six months. It blew my mind.
When I pressed him for the reason he kept getting tickets, it sounded as if it was a mixture of confusion about parking permit requirements, ambiguity around the steps one follows to actually get one, and sheer inability to get to the SFMTA office during open hours because of rigorous job commitments. Turns out, it was actually easier for Marc to just go online to pay off the citations with his debit card from time to time, instead of navigating the intricacies of how to obtain a permit.
As a Fellow at Code for America, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the interfaces between citizens and their government, and the differences between a well-designed civic experience and a poor one. This situation bewildered me. Clearly, if the barrier to getting a permit is so incredibly high that Marc is willing to shell out a thousand dollars, there is something wrong with a) the citizen parking experience, b) his mental model of trade-offs, or c) some combination of the two. Here are some of Marc’s tickets.
I asked him to walk me through how he pays them. We navigated to SFMTA’s Citation Payment site, entered his citation number, selected one, entered his debit card information, and voilà. With three page clicks, the ticket was taken care of. Time commitment: under two minutes. A beautiful user experience flow.
Then, we tried to figure out how to get a parking permit. The first step was to use an interactive map to figure out what zone he lived in. The second was to download and fill out a permit application. The third was to submit it “in person or by mail to the SFMTA Customer Service Center at 11 South Van Ness Avenue, open Monday-Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.” Time commitment: completely unknown. It takes Marc about 40 minutes to get to the SFMTA location from his house, so if he could make it during hours of operation, we could estimate the minimum commitment to be an hour and a half, not counting the mystery waiting time. If he were to submit by mail, it would take at least 10 days to review his request (and let’s be honest: in the era of precipitously decreasing snail-mail usage, the printer-envelope-stamp-mailbox process is time-consuming unto itself).
I dug a little deeper. According to SFMTA, the City of San Francisco brings in over $95 million in revenue every year from parking violations, while sales of residential parking permits yield under $10 million a year. Why is it so difficult to get a parking permit, but so easy to pay a parking ticket? Is there a mismatch of incentives here that is reflected through the quality of civic service design?
I asked Marc if he was planning to dispute his citation. After looking at the steps on the back of the ticket, he raised an eyebrow. The process of protesting a parking ticket is so laborious that entire companies have been born to navigate that single task. The team at Fixed, a mobile app that helps you fight your parking ticket by snapping a photo of it, woke up one morning to 3,000 folks signed up for their waitlist, which then grew to 30,000 over the following week. “Part of the success does lie in the fact that the parking ticket system is pretty terrible, and people want to talk about it,” they wrote.
If you subscribe to the “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” philosophy, many design-type folks from all over have proposed small urban interventions to help you not get a parking ticket in the first place. Margaret Hagan of the Open Law Lab suggested a crowd sourced parking ticket map for people who’ve been burned to share advice and warnings; designer Nikki Sylianteng presented a highly visual, timechart-based street parking sign redesign; as did Trisha Kietikul, who used a calendar for inspiration.
But beyond mere design concepts, some real efforts have been made to improve the citizen parking ticket experience. The City of San Antonio’s IT Department redesigned their court website with an “infographic” approach to guide users through the main court processes. One of the touchpoints is a simple, effective flowchart that clearly outlines the choices you have and the steps to take after receiving a traffic citation. The City of Atlanta takes it a step further. If you get a court date to protest your citation, you can text your citation number to ATLCourt and receive details and reminders about your case.
In last year’s redesign of NYC.gov, the team made the bold choice to place a large hero slider with stories about the city as the first thing you see on the site. The most trafficked parts, the self service parts (for instance, paying a parking ticket) were clear but placed below the main story section. It was a risky decision because from a strictly functional design perspective, self-service should be upfront and unobstructed, in the vein of the highly-celebrated gov.UK website. However, after testing, New York City discovered that every single user was able to accomplish the task they came for. What was interesting is that people would come to the site, pay their parking ticket, and then stick around to read one of the stories (e.g. learning about a new taxpayer initiative). This was a huge win in striking the delicate balance between allowing users to do something on the site and letting the city communicate with the people.
This led me to wonder:
can the experience of paying a parking ticket be more than a transaction?
Could parking tickets present a rich, untapped opportunity for the city to better communicate with its people? 1,549,518 parking violations are doled out in San Francisco per year. That’s three tickets every minute — three physical touchpoints and possibly three subsequent digital touchpoints where the city could grab the opportunity to do something more.
What if along with your citation, you could also receive information about the next public meeting in your community? What if, at the point of paying, there was an opportunity to pay someone else’s citation who couldn’t afford it (à la the Detroit Water Project)? What if, on the back of the citation, you could get a transparent view of the specific cost and where exactly your money was going (to a bike lane, a future BRT vehicle, the salary of the SFMTA employee at the counter, etc.) — in the same way that Everlane breaks down the price of a t-shirt?
Or instead of paying a parking ticket with your hard-earned cash, you could choose to pay it back in other civic ways with your time and skills. Imagine you could pay a $76 ticket (Violation Code TRC7.2.20: RESIDENTIAL OVERTIME) by mentoring two kids for the Mayor’s Youth Employment Program. Or you could get out of a $117 citation (Violation Code V5204A: REGISTRATION TABS) by getting a group of friends to hang out and clean the neighborhood park for a couple hours on a Saturday. Today, San Francisco offers the Project 20 Work Credit Program, but it requires a complex, multi-day, multi-step sign-up process. What if you could see those concrete, alternative options right at the point of payment?
After talking to Marc and probing through the severity of his situation, his shoulders sagged with an air of powerlessness and resignation to the grand system that is the City of San Francisco. Granted, he could just take a half-day off of work and go to the SFMTA (something only some residents can do). But there’s a larger question here: How could the parking ticketing and permitting experience be redesigned to reduce barriers, increase civic engagement, and bring some transparency to a municipal system that often feels overwhelming and opaque? There are numerous models to follow, but in a place like San Francisco, it seems feasible that a new, leading-edge approach could be developed that maximizes both digital and real-world tools, so we can save our frustration for other parts of our commute.
You can follow Tiffany Chu on Twitter at @tchu88. Subscribe to re:form’s RSS feed, sign up to receive our stories by email, and follow the main page here.
Cover photo by Aaron Anderer. All others by the author.
