There’s nothing more irritating than a persistent
chatbot.
Unless it gets you out of a parking ticket.
Chatbots are usually annoying. Maybe it’s
trying to fool you into visiting a site that
will dump malware on your computer. Or some
company is relying upon a chatbot to take
the place of a human customer service representative.
But what if a chatbot could help you overturn
an unfair parking ticket? That’s what Joshua
Browder’s chatbot can do. Browder attends
Stanford University and has a history with
parking tickets, having racked up about 30
of them when he was 18 and living in London.
Browder’s service is called Do Not Pay and
it’s surprisingly effective. The service
only covers London and New York City but people
have already used it in 250,000 parking ticket
cases. In 160,000 of those cases, courts overturned
the ticket, according to Browder. That’s
a success rate of 64%. Browder says the savings
to users amounts to 4 million dollars. The
chatbot isn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card,
though. Browder wanted to prevent local governments
from treating parking tickets as a revenue
source. He didn’t intend it to be a tool
to help the guilty go free. If you want to
use it to contest a ticket, you first must
answer a series of questions to see if you’re
eligible. With the New York version, the first
question is “Which of these best describes
why you shouldn’t receive a parking ticket?”
Answers range from “I entered the incorrect
date on a permit” to “The vehicle has
diplomatic immunity.” Depending upon your
answer, you’ll see new questions to narrow
down the approach. Do Not Pay will generate
the appropriate paperwork on your behalf.
The service also provides suggestions to contest
certain types of tickets. For example, if
you claim the signage was absent, obstructed
or confusing, Do Not Pay suggests you include
pictures to support your case. What Browder’s
work illustrates is that contesting a parking
ticket, while frustrating and time consuming,
is relatively straightforward if you know
what you’re doing. And unlike a lawyer,
Do Not Pay helps people for free. Browder
plans to expand Do Not Pay to other cities.
The service can also help you pursue a refund
for delayed flights. And Browder wants to
create other automated systems to help more
people, including one that would allow Syrian
refugees to apply for asylum in other nations.
That wraps up this story but we’ve got so
much more to share. Make sure you visit now.howstuffworks.com
every day for more interesting, thought-provoking
or downright weird stories. And don’t forget
to subscribe to the HowStuffWorks Now podcast
- it will automatically make you the smartest
person in the room. Guaranteed. Not an actual
guarantee.
