Charleston’s TheDigitel (CC BY 2.0)

A startup will help you fight parking tickets with the swipe of a finger. Fixed, an app created by a man who was tired of having to pay “bogus” fines, will allow you to upload a picture of your ticket along with any evidence to fight it and will let you know its chances of getting dismissed. Then, and here’s the best part, it will contest the fine for you. It’s available only in the beta stages in San Francisco for now, but it may be coming soon to a phone near you.

Nextshark:

It’s a sight we all dread- you get back to your car and find a parking ticket tucked under your windshield wiper ready to suck the dollars out of your wallet. Whether you parked in a red zone, didn’t move it for street cleaning, or perhaps even the meter maid messed up, there’s now an app for that. Fixed is an app created by entrepreneur David Hegarty that will fight your ticket in court for you.

Here’s how it works- after you sign up with Fixed, you take a picture of your parking ticket with your mobile and enter it on the app along with the violation number. After providing any other additional pictures of the curb, street signs, etc., the app tells you the probability of getting it dismissed. Fixed then sends a contest letter to the court that you digitally sign through your mobile device and they handle all communication from there. If your ticket gets dismissed, you only pay 25% of what it would have cost to Fixed. If you lose though, you pay the ticket like normal but you don’t owe Fixed anything. What do you have to lose?

It all began when founder David Hegarty went to pay for four parking tickets only to come back to find two more waiting on his car. “The tickets were complete bullshit, and I knew they had been erroneously issued” he told TechCrunch. Now the startup is aiming for a piece of the $100 million pie that San Francisco alone gets from parking tickets. According to the article, the U.S. in whole collects about $3 billion a year in tickets, a huge market to challenge the government in.

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—Posted by Natasha Hakimi

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