160,000 people don't have to pay parking tickets, thanks to chatbot

Many people, when confronted with a parking ticket, will pay the fine. But Stanford University sophomore Joshua Browder decided after receiving a spate of his own tickets that there had to be a better way.

At 18, Browder received 30 parking tickets when he was driving in and around his home city of London, the Guardian reported. So the self-taught programmer decided to devise his own solution to a dreaded slip on the windshield.

After three months of programming, Browder, now 19, rolled out DoNotPay, a free chatbot that asks users questions about the circumstances around their ticket to determine if it can be contested.

Users of the website, upon starting a chat with its “robot lawyer,” are asked where their ticket was issued, if they were driving their car and other questions about why the traffic ticket was issued. The website will draft an appeal that can be sent to the ticketing agency, and even includes a Google street view embed that lets users take pictures of the intersection where they may have been ticketed.

Since launching it in London last autumn, 160,000 tickets have been successfully contested, Browder estimated in an interview with VentureBeat. 9,000 of those were in New York City, where the U.S. version of the chatbot launched in March.

And that’s not the the chatbot’s only skill: it can also help demand compensation for delayed flights.

Browder, who hails from Britain, called bots “a huge opportunity for public service” in an interview with the BBC.

It’s not perfect — the 160,000 successfully overturned tickets represent 64 percent of the total 250,000 requests filed to the website since it was first launched in London last year.

But the chatbot charges nothing, making it accessible to those Browder said are disproportionately affected by a ticket.

“I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society,” Browder told VentureBeat. “These people aren’t looking to break the law. I think they’re being exploited as a revenue source by the local government.”

DoNotPay’s next ticket-busting stop will be Seattle sometime this fall, Browder told VentureBeat. But though the chatbot might help contest tickets, it won’t stop you from getting them. Browder tweeted Tuesday that even he had gotten another parking ticket that day from Stanford police:

This story was originally published June 28, 2016 at 12:17 PM with the headline "160,000 people don't have to pay parking tickets, thanks to chatbot."