At Gizmodo HQ in Sydney, there aren’t a lot of options for parking your car. Sure, there are a few one hour parking spots, but that means you have to drag yourself away from gadgety goodness every hour to check if your car’s been marked. Fortunately, Aussie developer Andrew Tweedie has taken it upon himself to launch Mapkats, an iPhone app that lets you follow the movements of those ticketing bastards that are the bane of drivers everywhere.
The app allows users to place colour-coded markers onto Google Maps, which indicates the location of ticket inspectors and gives other drivers an indication of where to avoid. The markers fade from red (marked within the past 30 minutes) to orange (marked within the last hour) to yellow (marked within last two hours) after a couple of hours, so you know they’ve moved on.
The problem with the service is a minor one, in that it requires users to upload the markers themselves, which in itself requires lots of users to be effective. Still, anything that takes on those stupid revenue raising assholes is a winner in our books.
[Mapkats via Lifehacker and News.com.au]
matt
December 23, 2009 at 10:12 AM
cool! now do it for speed cameras!
Report PermalinkRed T-Rex
December 23, 2009 at 2:50 PM
I’m not a parking inspector nor do I know anyone who is but I think it’s a bit rough to label the guys handing out the tickets as “Bastards”. The real enemy are the councils who use outrageous parking policies and ripoff prices that often encourage people to push the boundaries that result in fines. Not my choice of occupation but these guys are usually just trying to put food on the table like everyone else.
Report PermalinkNick Ayre
December 24, 2009 at 2:03 AM
I agree but Whos the bad guy with drugs, the dealer or the people that make it. (Dealer being the Parking inspector and …)
Report PermalinkGreg
December 23, 2009 at 11:24 PM
And what is so hard about paying for an all day parking spot in a car park, or taking public transport like the rest of us?
If you want to drive your four wheeled deathbox to work, you *should* be forced to pay for parking!
Report PermalinkDayton
January 24, 2010 at 6:52 PM
Personally i dont have an iphone and neither does my office. I use http://www.parkinginspector.com at work. You place a marker in a map and everyone in the office and surrounding area is sent an email. It’s saved me tickets.
Report PermalinkBill
March 23, 2011 at 12:18 AM
Haha, I AM a parking inspector. (it really is quite a nice job… Meet plenty of friendly people). Areas that I work in, I find people setting their mobile alarms to when their ticket expires. I had one charming fellow come up to me with his phone telling me that this app (or something very similar, I didn’t care too much as I was chasing a Aston to book) “would be the end of me”. personally, haven’t felt the difference, but time will tell!
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