But isn't that (claimed to be) the exact model used by the parking authority? Write tickets without a lot of care for getting it right, knowing that most people aren't going to fight it? What's good for the goose...

Every single contest is custom written, and has an extremely thorough review which includes: 1) automated check (check for missing/incorrect information) 2) low level review (primarily done by a team in India that uses Google Street view to measure the distance to closest signs) 3) high level review (performed by an Advocate in SF who double check the previous steps, and also reviews all notes and input from the user).

The advocate in SF then finalizes the contest letter and submits.

In general, about 2/3 of the tickets issued by the SFMTA and other parking ticket authorities have some issue with them.

I'd also like to point out, that it is not in our interest to submit frivolous contests. Each submitted contest requires time and resources on our end to submit the contest AND monitor the contest and process the return letter.

Finally... if your wife had two similar contest submitted, I might suggest that the SFMTA has become fat and lazy from lack of oversight, and continues to make the same trivial mistakes in each ticket.

I'm having a hard time understanding how this isn't confirmation of exactly what I experienced and described. I'm sure there are lots of minor trivialities that might get filled out slightly wrong a decent percentage of the time, none of which have anything to do with the validity of the ticket. So if you know all the tiny trivial loopholes you have a decent chance of finding something done "wrong" for otherwise perfectly appropriate tickets.

So yeah, you're able to point out the tiniest unimportant mistakes on a parking citation and then take advantage of that flaw in the system to get people out of valid tickets. It's impressive I suppose, but not something I'd personally brag about.

1 inch over the curb... we're going to tow your car with $700 worth of fines.

No visible sign on the street and nothing within 100 ft (which there has to be by law)... it doesn't matter, you should have known we intended that street to have no parking between 4-6pm.

If you tried to come up with a system with more adverse and broken incentives, you'd be hard pushed to come up with a better one than the SFMTA. 1) Let's saddle this organization with $10Ms of losses each year. 2) Let's give them the authority to issue tickets and fine the citizens for breaking an arbitrary set of laws. 3) Let's allow them keep the fines and treat it as 'revenue'. 4) Let's allows them to regulate themselves and decided if the tickets they issued are fair.

You're doing god's work <3

> Using its app, Fixed customers could snap a photo of their parking ticket using their phone’s camera, and then Fixed would check against a variety of common errors before writing a customized letter to the city on the user’s behalf.

The app is meant to do the ticket-checking, not the user. Additionally the website itself for Fixed mentions that they do the checking, not the end user.

But yeah, you're entirely right.

Heaven forfend the citizenry have the right to defend themselves before being punished by the state.

Otherwise entitled drivers refuse to accept that city parking space is an inherently limited resource that must be shared, and protest any regulation as if unlimited free parking is some kind of basic human right.

There are places where space is carved out just for loading and not parking, but it's not the common thing, especially in residential areas.

I see this as a miniature version of the extremely worrying argument about plea bargaining, that it is necessary because the courts couldn't handle the huge volume of trials that would be required without it.

If you're handing out so many violations that you can't handle everyone engaging in an active defense against them, then you're doing something deeply wrong, and the solution isn't to discourage people from exercising their legal rights.

Yes, we all have an interest in parking space being appropriately regulated, but we all have a much greater interest in the state's punitive power being appropriately exercised, and I'm sure there are ways to achieve both anyway.

I also just want to point out, the SFMTA has brought this on themselves. If they didn't have such an egregious erroneous ticket rate, Fixed could never be profitable. They only get paid if you don't have to pay the ticket, so if the SFMTA had an error rate of 5% rather than 33% Fixed wouldn't have enough to work with.