Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Transportation

DoNotPay Bot Has Beaten 160,000 Traffic Tickets -- and Counting (venturebeat.com) 180

Khari Johnson, writing for VentureBeat:A bot made to challenge traffic tickets has been used more than 9,000 times by New Yorkers, according to DoNotPay maker Joshua Browder. The bot was made available to New Yorkers in March. In recent years and decades, residents of The Big Apple have seen a persistent increase in traffic fines. A record $1.9 billion in traffic fines was issued by the City of New York in 2015. Since the first version of the bot was released in London last fall, 160,000 of 250,000 tickets have been successfully challenged with DoNotPay, Browder said. "I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society," said Browder. "These people aren't looking to break the law. I think they're being exploited as a revenue source by the local government." Browder, who's 19, hopes to extend DoNotPay to Seattle this fall.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

DoNotPay Bot Has Beaten 160,000 Traffic Tickets -- and Counting

Comments Filter:
  • Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @05:51PM (#52409585)

    I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society.

    What's higher than first-world problems?

    • Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @08:08PM (#52410193)

      He's 19. Guys that age aren't exactly known for their sense of perspective. Heck, many of them are only marginally human.

    • It's worth noting that this service is for the United Kingdom. Robot lawyers or systems that give you legal advise based on questions the application asks you are illegal or fall on very shaky grounds.

  • Oddly enough, if you go to the DoNotPay site and look at the reg button you will see a prove HIV disclosure??? WTF does that have to do w/ paying parking tickets? When you click the link it takes you to another form on the same site discussing the difficulties of HIV disclosures http://goo.gl/nJCjAL. Granted this might be a side project, but talk about mixed messaging.

  • by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @06:00PM (#52409635) Homepage Journal

    I get a note saying "parking fine".

    • You are the reincarnation of Tommy Cooper AICMFP
    • by wwalker ( 159341 )

      I get compliments about my ass from everyone too. "What an ass!" they say all the time. Starbucks, on the bus, in movie theaters, you name it. And what a fine donkey it is indeed!

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @06:18PM (#52409717)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by WolfgangVL ( 3494585 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @06:28PM (#52409757)

      Right, using technology to get the upper hand in civil matters as bad bad bad. Unless the government is doing to make money off of citizens, in that case, it
      ay-oh-kay!

      BACK IN LINE CITIZEN! You will pay whatever fine we choose to levy against you.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • So your saying automating my response to automated traffic tickets is a bad thing? I'm instead supposed to expend my resources to pay a lawyer and/or suspend my own resource generation method to attend traffic court in my own defense of said automatically generated traffic fines?

          This guy found a useful and novel use of technology for citizens to defend themselves in direct response to another useful and novel use of a technology by government to extract revenue from its citizens.

          It is driving commerce by th

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • What is the deal with this dichotomy between "the evil government" and you or me? Do you have a better method for wrangling the cats of many competing viewpoints in an ordered society? And yes, using technology to gain the upper hand in civil matters can be a bad thing. If you have traffic fines to deter people from driving in a way that is inconvenient or dangerous for others, and then a few technologically savvy people figure out how to avoid those fines, all you are going to create is a group of people who are undeterred by traffic fines and drive like maniacs. Ideally there would be a process for appealing unjustified citations (which there is), but the solution is not just to circumvent the whole system unless you think the laws are fine for everyone except you.

          but but but... sometimes my side loses in an election, and this is clearly tyranny and Shall Not Stand.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Sorry to ruin your tirade but not all parking tickets are because somebody broke a traffic law. I've gotten one in my life. I parked in the spot where a cop normally parked when he was going to visit the woman he was having an affair with. I parked my legal vehicle on a street which street parking was permitted. My crime was I made him park across the street. It was in front of my own house for christ sake. Still had to go fight it all because I dared to slightly inconvenience a cop.

      • Sorry to ruin your tirade but not all parking tickets are because somebody broke a traffic law. I've gotten one in my life. I parked in the spot where a cop normally parked when he was going to visit the woman he was having an affair with. I parked my legal vehicle on a street which street parking was permitted. My crime was I made him park across the street. It was in front of my own house for christ sake. Still had to go fight it all because I dared to slightly inconvenience a cop.

        a few decades back i got a notice of unpaid parking ticket in the mail with the extra $$$ charge. not only did I not remember getting one, but at that point in my life i didn't drive much at all, biked everywhere so i was extra skeptical rather than assuming i had missed seeing it.
        tried to contest it, they demanded I provide them the details of the ticket which i was claiming i had never received.
        I went to city hall to get a copy of the missing ticket. clerk pointed to a huge literal pile of tickets in the

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      NYC meter maids would never [nytimes.com], ever [nytimes.com], EVER [abc7ny.com] write bogus tickets. The only reason the NYPD started using the handheld ticket machine was to try to cut down on the number of tickets that were thrown out because they were questionable or obviously bogus. It was an attempt to keep them honest (so the city would get more money). When I moved to NYC my truck was ticketed so often for being a "commercial" vehicle (despite not meeting any of the requirements) that I ended up selling it because fighting every single

    • What is the deal with every startup or tech company or whatever trying to take the moral high ground on whatever they happen to have found some marketable niche for? "...The most vulnerable people in society"? Give me a fucking break.

      Back at you. It is as they say. Our car was towed in San Francisco a couple of years ago, and it was $500 to get it out. Did you get that? $500. Imagine someone working for $18/hour (sarcasm obvious), and needing that car to get to work. Hell, the car might not be WORTH more than $500. There was a couple crying at the pound in that exact situation. That was one of the most depressing and infuriating moments of my life.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • What is the deal with every startup or tech company or whatever trying to take the moral high ground on whatever they happen to have found some marketable niche for? "...The most vulnerable people in society"? Give me a fucking break.

        Back at you. It is as they say. Our car was towed in San Francisco a couple of years ago, and it was $500 to get it out. Did you get that? $500. Imagine someone working for $18/hour (sarcasm obvious), and needing that car to get to work. Hell, the car might not be WORTH more than $500. There was a couple crying at the pound in that exact situation. That was one of the most depressing and infuriating moments of my life.

        once again decades ago, the local paper ran an expose of the local towing scheme; the city had a contract with one tow company who would haul the car to a yard way the hell out of town in a shady area, and demanded cash only to release the vehicle. no atm anywhere near, of course.
        naturally a couple of years later, another expose of the corrupt deals the tow company was making with a lot of cops, with kickbacks, people being towed while legally parked, etc. etc. etc.

    • Re:saving the world (Score:4, Informative)

      by LMariachi ( 86077 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @12:32AM (#52411105) Journal

      You know how I know you didn't RTFA?

      Since the creation of DoNotPay, Browder has begun work on a bot to help people with HIV understand their legal rights and one to collect compensation for people whose flights were delayed beyond four hours.

      He’s also creating a bot that helps refugees apply for asylum, as part of the Highland Capital summer startup accelerator program. It will utilize IBM Watson to translate from Arabic to English.

    • There are cops chasing cars with radar guns or laser, so that when you get a ticket you feel like you got unlucky, and people like you can take the "moral high ground". If that same cop watched traffic cams with a stopwatch or simply counted frames in the video, he could issue many more citations than having to catch speeders with radar, and there would be video evidence very hard to beat. Heck, a lot of it could be automated, take the cop out of the equation altogether. Similarly you could use toll readers

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      Yeah the "most vulnerable people" part is bullshit.

      But, traffic violation tickets are a scam. Over here, it usually takes weeks, sometimes a month or two, until you get the letter. Where it basically gives you the opportunity to pay or write back with a statement. That delay is either gross incompetence or intentional, because yeah, sure I know exactly what I was doing when I was driving some road I already forgot six weeks ago. I can definitely swear under oath that I was not doing over the speed limit. I

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      In some places traffic laws are used to prey on the poor and vulnerable. For example, by setting unreasonably short timings at traffic lights you can increase the number of red light tickets, and if the area is poor then the citizens are less able to investigate and fight back.

    • If you really cared so much about vulnerable people, you would be doing social work or something along those lines.

      I'd like to be a house representative. On the subject of vulnerable people, we can discuss new taxation plans which only marginally raise taxes on the rich (0.69% less income to the top 0.1%; 2% less income to someone with $10M annual salary) and the effects on the poor in a failing welfare system [wordpress.com], as well as the stabilizing effect on all low-income families [google.com]. In the long run, I want to target a maximum tax bracket of 1/3 above marginal (a United States flat income tax would be 29.97%; the top tax bracket

  • When there are legitimate reasons that you shouldn't have to pay the ticket, in my experience it requires no more than a simple presentation of those reasons to city hall. where the ticket would be paid, and the penalty is always dropped entirely.

    The only time I have ever seen people have to pay for parking tickets is when they actually deserved them and reasonably could have known better, but either forgetfulness or simple laziness led to the situation where they ended up getting one.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I assume you have never seen a NYC Parking sign Cluster.
      Several signs that you would need to go through each sign to determine if any preclude parking now.

    • by tomhath ( 637240 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @08:18PM (#52410229)
      The bot helps a person decide if the reasons they have are "legitimate", and it gives some pointers on what evidence to bring if you decide to challenge. I don't understand why you think that's useless.
      • by mark-t ( 151149 )
        Because I've rarely seen anyone get a parking ticket where any of the reasons it suggests might be a defense for the ticket are even applicable, and where any of them would have applied, you could just tell them that information at city hall where you go to pay for the ticket, and the fine is waived. It is far more common that a parking ticket is the result of something like forgetfulness... letting a parking meter run out, for instance... and there's shit-all that a 'bot like this will do to defend you.
        • by eWarz ( 610883 )
          I have. I didn't even fight it, I just filed it away in my filing cabinet since it didn't have a court date or anything. I was on camera where I parked. I took a picture of the signage (it was a bit confusing the way it was worded, this was NYC well over a decade ago). Next time I drove into NYC, the signage was changed to be more clear. I haven't heard a peep out of them since. No collection letters, nothing. The only theory I could come up with is that they got sued over the signage being unclear.
    • When there are legitimate reasons that you shouldn't have to pay the ticket, in my experience it requires no more than a simple presentation of those reasons to city hall. where the ticket would be paid, and the penalty is always dropped entirely.

      The only time I have ever seen people have to pay for parking tickets is when they actually deserved them and reasonably could have known better, but either forgetfulness or simple laziness led to the situation where they ended up getting one.

      I got a parking ticket in West Palm Beach at 9:45pm on a Friday night. The parking meter was literally inside of a bush. I didn't even think to look for one because what small city makes anyone pay for parking on a Friday at that hour downtown? Could I have fought the ticket and won? Probably. But it was a $30 ticket and the cost of going out of my way (I do not live anywhere near West Palm Beach) would have far exceeded the fine. My resolution? Pay the parking ticket and never visit that piece of shit

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • http://www.princeofpetworth.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/conflicting-parking-signs-e1285855592236.jpg is clear enough to me (though complicated): To the right: 1) No parking, ever. 2) Standing (Loading in the UK I assume) is permitted outside of Mon-Fri rush hours. To the left: 1) Parking is only permitted on Sundays between the stated hours; 2) Standing permitted as to the right. Then again, I'm English and our councils invented signage like this!

          Of course the signs can be interpreted. But why would they require someone sit there and analyze the sign in detail before deciding to park? And there are plenty of people with reading comprehension skills that would have a very difficult time understanding the logic of the signs. In fact, that makes me think that someone with dyslexia or has some other processing disorder should sue the city of New York in US Federal Court for violating the Americans With Disability Act as those signs could be considere

      • When there are legitimate reasons that you shouldn't have to pay the ticket, in my experience it requires no more than a simple presentation of those reasons to city hall. where the ticket would be paid, and the penalty is always dropped entirely.

        The only time I have ever seen people have to pay for parking tickets is when they actually deserved them and reasonably could have known better, but either forgetfulness or simple laziness led to the situation where they ended up getting one.

        I got a parking ticket in West Palm Beach at 9:45pm on a Friday night. The parking meter was literally inside of a bush. I didn't even think to look for one because what small city makes anyone pay for parking on a Friday at that hour downtown? Could I have fought the ticket and won? Probably. But it was a $30 ticket and the cost of going out of my way (I do not live anywhere near West Palm Beach) would have far exceeded the fine. My resolution? Pay the parking ticket and never visit that piece of shit city ever again.

        Not to mention the fact that the purpose of the bot is to help determine whether or not the parking ticket is valid. Have you ever parked a car in NYC? You can have three parking signs with different days and hours specified that basically make parking illegal 24/7 in that space. Why don't they just put a sign that says "No Parking at Any Time"? Because that's too straight forward and doesn't enhance parking ticket revenue. Two second on Google found this [princeofpetworth.com] prime example

        and, the defective meters; we have a lot of streets here where it's max one hour parking until 5 pm, then unlimited parking but you still have to pay. the thing is, if you arrive there at 5 or shortly thereafter, the meter doesn't always know what time it is so you feed a bunch of cash or a credit card to it, and it pops up an hour of time, though you've paid for two or three.
        and of course, the meters that just don't work right, so you feed them for an hour and come back 55 min later and the meter is expir

    • Whenever I have interacted with parking ticket appeals systems, they appear to be a formula lottery - appeal within 45 days and you have a 60% chance of being granted the appeal, presuming you don't write in the reason box something along the lines of "because you all are a bunch of arbitrary idiots and I saw you parking illegally last week too." (Even that might get granted, I think when time's up for reading they throw half in the granted box and half in the denied box.) After the appeals deadline is pa

  • These are taxes; pretty much any time we pay the government money, that is a tax.

    • Not really.

      Taxes are levied universally according to some standard. E.g., income taxes on a particular income bracket.

      Fees are paid for services by those who use them. (Though, lately, some places are instituting administrative fees in a manner that functions like fines.)

      Fines are penalties paid by those who violate a law or regulation.

      In theory, the government would collect zero fines if everyone followed the law all the time. The same does not apply for taxes or fees.

  • So what is behind the question of the parking spot being to small?
    If the car to big for the spot and you park in it that is your fault.
    • There are also some national and local laws which govern the size of parking bays (to prevent exploiative charging by painting impossibly small spaces). If these are not observed then there is a technical defence against some charges.

      There was a spot on one of the local BBC news recently about two men who were spending their retirement measuring various car parks as some local authorities had repainted the lines to squeeze in a few more places and were then issuing fines for "not parking properly" ie within

      • yet were moaning over loss of access to low cost parking spaces.

        At the same time, if everyone shrinks their parking spaces then there is nowhere to park.

        If public or municipal parking spaces cannot fit every street-legal consumer vehicle, then there ought to be disclaimers or exceptions as needed.

        If you're going to have a legal standard for private vehicles, you might as well employ that standard universally when it comes to traffic and parking laws.

  • If you mess with a cities income I suggest a lot of Kevlar body armor, and a food taster as well. Cities can play harder than the mafia. One way or another they will mess with you.
  • Fair Enough (Score:5, Insightful)

    by twmcneil ( 942300 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @09:46PM (#52410567)
    Ok, I read TFA, sue me. Sounds like the bot is just looking for technicalities that will void the ticket. Fair enough.Have you ever heard of a corporation that avoided some tax based on a technicality? I could think of a few.

    Better yet. Ever have a cop give you a ticket based on a technicality? I have.

    Technicalities are not reserved for use by only one side. They are fair game to all. Seems to me that this one is just making these technicalities available to all. Fair enough.
  • Traffic tickets are not the same as parking tickets. The terms are not interchangeable.

  • Apparently I'm the only one who has trouble believing that this app has been used successfully to challenge 160,000 tickets. It appears the reporter took the developer's word for that. Any proof at all of that rather extraordinary claim?

Been Transferred Lately?

Working...