RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And today's last word in business is: The Fixer.
People in the Bay Area are familiar with San Francisco's many complicated parking laws and the very expensive consequences of disobeying them. Nearly half of all parking tickets are dismissed in court, but fighting a ticket takes time and some knowledge.
Now there's an app for that. David Hegarty started Fixed, an app that fights parking tickets for you. He thought it up after a very tiring morning.
DAVID HEGARTY: I came back from paying I think it was four separate parking tickets - two of which I think were a little questionable. And I came back to my car and found another two on the windscreen.
MONTAGNE: Hegarty contested those tickets and won. And once he figured out how easy it is when you do go to court, he wanted to help other people do it too. Here's how it works: You give the app details about your parking ticket and send photos of your car and the app find one of its parking exports to fight the ticket so you don't have to. If you advocate wins, you pay 25 percent of the cost of your ticket to Fixed. If the advocate loses, you pay nothing except the ticket, of course.
For the moment, the app is only available in San Francisco, where it's been so popular there's currently a wait list. Fixed will soon be expanding to other cities to fight parking tickets everywhere. And Hegarty says he is already getting pleading emails from drivers in L.A.
And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.