She's Got a Ticket to Slide

Women never care, but whenever it comes up with men I meet – butchers, bakers, cappuccino makers – they inevitably give me the gas face. Sometimes they'll even start talking a bit louder, then a little s-l-o-w-e-r, just so I won't miss anything. Apparently not knowing how to drive has made me not just a social deviant, but deaf and mildly retarded too.

Car culture bites.

So yeah, I'm a public transportation baby who still doesn't know how to drive, but that doesn't mean I don't know from auto-induced drama. Rocking the sidewalk, buses, subways, bikes and taxis doesn't exempt me from the endless societal yapping about auto insurance rates, road rage (shockingly, it's always the other guy who's the asshole), traffic jams, long commutes, etc., ad nauseum, amen.

But it's the parking and parking tickets that seem to yank everyone's chain. So I was thrilled to learn that ParkingTicket.com is finally rolling into my Philadelphia stomping grounds. I may not know how to drive, but I may have finally stumbled upon the secret to getting folks to stop bitching about parking tickets.

Glen Bolofsky, an accountant-turned-entrepreneur who's been fighting unlawful parking tickets in one way or another since 1982 (obsessive much?), launched the ParkingTicket.com Web site in 2001, and is now delighting angry drivers (and the companies that employ them) in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Chicago, New York, Boston, and now Philadelphia.

Going on the premise that most parking violation tickets are illegally issued or overpriced, the Web site claims a 75% success rate and keeps you from schlepping to City Hall to try and wrangle your way out it.

It goes a little something like this: Log into the site and pay 1/2 of the ticket price up front. If ParkingTicket.com wins your appeal, they keep the money and you've only paid half of what the ticket would have originally cost. If you lose, ParkingTicket.com will refund your money. Easy, peasy, done.

Now let's talk about my upcoming driving lessons....