The last thing you want to do the morning after a long night of drinking and partying is walk to your car and find an envelope containing a parking ticket.

Now, in a flash of bullshit, you owe more money than you even have. All from parking within a foot of a fire hydrant. Due to your busy schedule attending classes in the East Bay, you have no time to return to the city to contest the ticket.

So what do you do? Well, now there’s an app for that.

‘Fixed’ is a mobile app that allows you to take a photo of your parking ticket using your smart phone. Then through google street view, the app looks to see if the street has visible signs or insignia that may help in contesting your ticket.

From there, the app tries to find common errors in the ticket — and if it does — sends a custom letter to the appropriate police office. Fixed will fight in court on behalf of users against the citation. If the ticket is thrown out, users pay 25 percent of the ticket total to the mobile app company.

Now if you don’t win the case, users are able to pay the ticket through the app and not deal with the archaic police database. Which, last time we at the Inquirer checked, was about as good as a stone tablet.

However, the app is now hitting a brick wall in big cities, mainly Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In an interview with Tech Crunch David Hegarty, the co-founder of the app said, “San Francisco doesn’t have a way to submit a contest electronically, they insist that you mail it in,” So Hegarty began mailing tickets along with a letter to SFPD. When Hegarty started seeing tickets get “lost in the mail” his company began faxing letters to San Francisco. Not long after that, Fixed received an email from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. The email was a polite cease and desist to the company demanding that they stop faxing in letters.

Fixed claimed that it’s illegal for police to not accept this fax. So in return SFPD unplugged their fax machine, which by the way is another illegal offense. Essentially, this interaction between the two entities turned out to be some sort of oxymoron. 

But it didn’t stop there. Fixed was not only blocked from SFMTA, but also from Xerox, who refused to grant them access to their ticket website.

No government agency should create so many barriers for a ticket to be contested. SFPD are calling this app unjust because it’s taking revenue away from them. Tickets, are just another way for police agencies to pay for expenses. Without a sure line of revenue from ticketing, Fixed are taking a slice out of police departments budget’s. Which is a good thing.

The less tanks a police department can afford, the better.

Let’s cut a deal SFPD, allow us to send our tickets through Fixed, and we’ll let this whole fax machine incident slide. This is just a warning. Next time, it’ll be a ticket.