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Parking Pardons

A small New Jersey-based company has tapped into humankind's primal instinct to fight parking tickets. For a fee, parkingticket.com's software will scan databases in New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., hunting for technicalities or other reasons why a ticket could be challenged in those cities.

A small New Jersey-based company has tapped into humankind's primal instinct to fight parking tickets. For a fee, parkingticket.com's software will scan databases in New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., hunting for technicalities or other reasons why a ticket could be challenged in those cities. If the ticket is dismissed, the company is owed half the amount that would have gone to the city. If the ticket must be paid, the recipient antes up an additional $3.75 administrative fee to the company.

Businesses can subscribe to the service for $2,500 and up. It's worth it even for those with only four or five vehicles, says Glen Bolofsky, head of parkingticket.com. "If you're operating a small business, you don't really have the time" he says. "In the past, they were just paying these tickets," which can add up to tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Cities don't argue that their ticketing systems are perfect or that recipients of tickets should just pay up no matter what. "Considering there are 9.5 million tickets written annually, there are bound to be some that are defective in some way," says Jim Moses, spokesman for the New York City Department of Finance.

That agency, which collects about $380 million in revenue annually from parking fines, produces a brochure explaining how to appeal tickets. Moses wonders why people would pay a steep price for a ticket-fighting service when they could do it for themselves. "There are lots of motorists who feel their ticket was issued to them mistakenly," he says. "What I try to stress is, why use this expensive service when you can just as easily beat your ticket with us, and it's free."

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