The ticketbusters

A start-up comes to the aid of long-suffering motorists who have felt the long arm of the law while struggling to find parking.

By BUZZY GORDON
A high-enforcement area (photo credit: COURTESY BATLAN.COM)
A high-enforcement area
(photo credit: COURTESY BATLAN.COM)
Much has been written about the differences between hedonistically secular Tel Aviv and the holy city of Jerusalem. But there is one thing that plagues both cities equally: a severe shortage of parking space – and the attendant scourge of multitudinous parking tickets issued by enforcement officials.
In Tel Aviv, the phenomenon has reached international proportions. A study of the municipality’s budget reveals that the percentage of the city’s income from fines stemming from parking tickets is one of the highest in the world. In New York City, for example, the percentage of the Big Apple’s income from parking fines hovers around 1 percent, whereas in the Big Orange, this figure is three times as much (closer to 3%).
How does Tel Aviv manage to collect so much money? The figures are astounding: More than NIS 210 million is derived from parking fees and fines each year, with nearly NIS 130m. coming from fines alone. The fines add up due to the approximately 2,400 tickets handed out each day.
In Jerusalem, meanwhile, the specter of an unpaid parking fine can haunt you for years.
One Israeli who recently returned from living abroad was greeted with the discovery that the Jerusalem Municipality had placed a lien on his bank account to collect on a parking ticket issued in 2011. It made no difference that the rental car had been parked in a space not easily discernible as illegal and that, to be on the safe side, the driver had prominently displayed a placard bearing the international handicap symbol. Naturally, the amount of the original fine – plus penalties and interest – had skyrocketed.
When faced with this kind of situation, frustrated Israeli drivers could hardly be blamed for wanting to fight back. And now they have an ally as accessible as the Internet: the Batlan (lit., the Nullifier) – “the experts at quashing parking tickets.”
The Batlan (batlan.pe.hu, in Hebrew only) is the brainchild of Yahel Kaplan, a recent lawschool graduate with a specialty in social entrepreneurship. He founded the Batlan last year with the aim of “fighting back vigorously” on behalf of mistreated motorists.
“We conducted a lot of research,” says Kaplan, “and found that many people were getting ticketed indiscriminately. Some were even paying for their parking using Pango yet were still being victimized by the system. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “our initial findings were only reinforced by what we learned from handling hundreds of requests to quash parking tickets.”
Kaplan explains, “The Batlan is a platform on which the ticketed motorist and our team work together to construct a defense. The system walks the client through the process of selecting grounds for contesting the ticket, then creates a petition seeking its dismissal. Finally, the client prints, reads and faxes the petition to the local number we provide.”
(The authorities much prefer receiving hard copies of pleas, the Batlan advises.) The Batlan is working on streamlining the system so that the petition would be filed on behalf of the client as well, although the company does like the client to read over the final product.
The document that is produced is carefully formatted and worded to be acceptable in a court of law. But the Batlan wants customers to know that the site is not in the business of dispensing legal advice.
“We provide a professional service concerning a matter of legal procedure,” insists Lior Zeitouni-Elert, the company’s newly appointed CEO. “It is an important distinction to make.”
According to Zeitouni-Elert, the Batlan’s mission is simply to level the playing field for the average citizen, who is up against an indifferent city hall.
“We are not encouraging scofflaws,” he maintains.
“But there has to be a balance between order and chaos, which is what reigns now.”
The Batlan’s research found that while many cities in the world earmark moneys earned from parking fines to improve parking infrastructure, this is not the case in Tel Aviv.
“The money the city earns from parking fines goes into the general coffers,” notes Zeitouni-Elert.
“Along with fairer enforcement of the laws governing parking, we would prefer that the moneys earned from fines go to ameliorating the parking situation.”
The Batlan has been operating for only a few months, but it already has somewhat of a track record.
“We have a success rate of 60% when it comes to getting our clients’ parking tickets dismissed,” says Zeitouni-Elert, “and we have saved them a total of NIS 4,000 in fines. Of course, we have barely scratched the surface. We have done no advertising and only a few media interviews, so we get only a handful of requests a day, while thousands of parking tickets are issued daily.”
While the Batlan is still in pilot mode, its services are free. This may change in a month or so as the company works to refine its business model.
“The options are to charge a nominal handling fee for each ticket or a monthly retainer that would cover our services for that month,” says Zeitouni-Elert.
“Meanwhile, none of the team has been taking salaries nor have we raised any financing. There is a group of investors from South Africa who have expressed interest, and we are negotiating an infusion of $250,000 until we reach the break-even point.
That would happen when we reach our goal of dealing with up to half of the 3,000 to 4,000 parking tickets issued in the country every day,” he says.
Currently, the drop-down menu of cities on the Batlan’s online form includes 26 localities, covering Israel’s major metropolitan areas.
“That does not mean we won’t accept an application from the periphery,” says Zeitouni-Elert. “But most parking tickets are issued in the center of the country.