[davidhegarty]

I'm just going to quickly jump in here. I'm David, one of the co-founders of Fixed.

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.

[dougmccune]

> 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.

[davidhegarty]

That's not how laws work. You can't have one set of rules for one stakeholder, and another set of rules for another. Particularly when one of those stakeholders gets to acts as enforcement, judiciary AND beneficiary.

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.

[edge17]

The "validity of the ticket" is determined by rules set forth by the city and the MTA. It also establishes the grounds for invalidity of a ticket. That's not taking advantage of the system, that's applying the system. The right way for the MTA to put Fixed out of business is to issue valid tickets that are held to a higher degree of scrutiny, otherwise the system just rots over time, as we see here.

[xkcd-sucks]

Why not proxy all the communications with the parking authority through the Fixed app, instead of sending them directly from your servers? It seems like this (or something similar) would make it much harder to "block" Fixed. And the parking authorities have no teason not to block you, especially when it's so easy as blocking a list of known ip addresses. (Barring an injunction in your favor or something)

You're doing god's work <3