Tow Zone Alerts

We help people avoid getting ticketed and towed when they park on the street through simple SMS alerts.

Active

Since 2022

Boston, MA

Open source: No

We offer three text services: (1) reminders before street cleaning, (2) real-time illegal parking alerts via license plate reporting, and (3) "what's happening?!" texts about nearby events. We operate in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville, and it's free to sign up! So far, we see that we reduce the incidence of towing from public towing logs. Before signing up, residents get towed an average of once per year. After, it goes down to 0.3 times per year. We've been featured in the Boston Globe, the Boston Bulletin, the Boston Globe Today, WHDH Channel 7 local news, and WBUR and WBZ radio! How does it work, you ask? We work with municipality governments to offer Services 1 & 2. For Service 1, we use street cleaning schedules from the cities we operate in—so far, Boston, Cambridge, Somerville. When people sign up, they share their approximate location so we can to send reminders about street cleaning on their 5 closest streets. In Service 2, illegally-parked license plates are reported by parking enforcement officers and crowd-sourced from engaged users. 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. In Service 3, we share about nearby events to subscribers who opt into the service by appending a blurb to regularly-scheduled street cleaning message.