For most drivers, especially those in a city, moving violations and parking tickets are a frustrating — and potentially costly — fact of life.
National statistics on parking and traffic tickets are tough to find, but experts estimate that Americans pay billions of dollars in speeding tickets each year. The real cost of a speeding ticket and other moving violations isn’t the ticket itself, but also the ancillary costs like increases to your auto insurance.
[READ: The Real Cost of a Traffic Ticket.]
Disputing a parking or traffic ticket can be a confusing process, so several smartphone apps and online tools now help you through it. Here’s a look at three options, including how they work, what they cost and more.
GetDismissed.com
If you get a traffic ticket in California, you typically have the option to “request trial by written declaration” (where you submit a written statement by mail rather than appear in traffic court). For a flat fee of $99, GetDismissed helps you through that process for minor infractions such as running a stop sign or speeding (it cannot help with misdemeanors, including reckless driving, hit and run or driving without a license). “Basically, we’re a self-help document facilitation service,” says Steve Miller, founder and CEO of GetDismissed. “The system develops the documents you need to print out, sign and send to the court. We’re sort of a LegalZoom for traffic tickets.”
Since GetDismissed is a DIY tool, the company does not track its success rate. However, Miller says contesting a ticket in California (the only state the service currently operates) by mail is often more successful and efficient than going to court.
But is it still worth disputing a ticket when you know you ran a red light or exceeded the speed limit? Yes, according to Miller. “It does not hurt you to fight those,” he explains. “The worst that could happen is you’re right back where you started. Maybe the city didn’t have the correct posted signs, maybe they issued that ticket past the number of days required to send you a ticket. There are ways to contest a ticket whether you are guilty or not.”
[READ: How Bad Behavior Affects Your Bottom Line.]
Fixed.com
For situations where you may need a lawyer to help you get a ticket and points dismissed, Fixed lets you upload the ticket and estimates the likelihood of that ticket being dismissed. If you decide to move forward, Fixed refers you to a traffic lawyer in the county you received the ticket. (Fixed used to handle parking tickets but no longer does so.) “We use our proprietary system to read that data and pass that to an attorney in a nice bundle,” says Fixed co-founder David Hegarty. “They can reach out to the user and talk with the user either in person, over the phone or over email.”
Currently, Fixed is available in every county of California. In counties with a high volume of Fixed users, the startup has negotiated a flat rate of $150 with attorneys. Rates can be higher in counties that have a lower volume of users and don’t have volume discounts negotiated.
“[With] the attorneys we work with, about 90 percent of the time they’ll succeed in getting the point dismissed [from your driving record],” Hegarty says. “The violation might be reduced to a nonmoving violation and the point removed. Sixty percent of the time they’ll be successful at getting the full fine removed or reduced.”
[READ: Decoding the Mysteries of High-Risk Car Insurance.]
AppWinIt.com
New York City is practically the nation’s capital for parking tickets, according to Ouriel Lemmel, CEO and founder of WinIt, so that’s where the iOS and Android app is focusing for now. “If you park [in New York City], and it’s not legal, you will [almost] always get a parking ticket,” he says. “It’s very frustrating. We wanted to have a solution for that.”
After launching last year, WinIt now processes between 150 and 200 tickets per day, and Lemmel hopes to up that volume before branching out into other violations such as speeding tickets. Of the 20,000 tickets WinIt has processed so far, the app has successfully dismissed around a third of them, Lemmel says.
Users take a photo of the ticket and upload it to the WinIt app. “We take it from there and keep the user informed of the status,” Lemmel says. If WinIt’s experts cannot get the ticket dismissed in a hearing, the user simply pays the ticket (which they can do directly through the app for a small processing fee) and pays nothing to WinIt. If WinIt gets your ticket dismissed, you’ll pay half of the ticket’s cost to the app and save the other half. The way penalties work in New York, disputing the ticket also gets you more time before you have to pay it. “The user will have another 30 days without any additional fee,” Lemmel says. “Even if you do end up losing the case, we buy time.”
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Tools That Will Help You Dispute Pesky Traffic and Parking Tickets originally appeared on usnews.com
