Tow Zone Alerts

Tow Zone Alerts (towzonealerts.com) is a community text alert service that helps residents in the Boston area navigate the ups and downs of city living — starting with the all-too-common issue of car ticketing and towing which costs Boston $80 million, or $120 per person, annually. TZA (1) sends warnings for relevant temporary no-parking zones (due to occupancy permits or street cleaning) according to public data and (2) facilitates and validates real-time illegal parking alerts based on license plate reporting from peers and parking enforcement officers. Also TZA aims to help opted-in subscribers take full advantage of their neighborhood by sharing snippets of information on fun/interesting local businesses, artists, and events. So far, we measure our service leads to an 80% reduction in towing incidence for subscribers. Before signing up, our subscribers get towed an average of once per year. After, it goes down to 0.2 times per year. We've been featured in the Boston Globe, Bay State Banner, the Boston Bulletin, the Boston Globe Today, WHDH Channel 7 local news, and WBUR and WBZ radio. How does it work? We work with municipality governments to obtain structured street parking rules. When people sign up, they share their approximate location so we can to send relevant warnings. In the peer-to-peer alert service, illegally-parked license plates are reported by parking enforcement officers and crowd-sourced from subscribers. We are working with cities to connect with their E-Citation software, so that residents are notified immediately whenever they receive a ticket. This encourages residents to relocate their vehicle to a legal spot, mitigating overly-punitive parking enforcement measures, like towing or additional tickets.