Yet another thing to thank our Jewish community in Britain for. A Jewish teenager from London has created a website that makes contesting parking tickets easier.
Joshua Browder, 18, created donotpay.co.uk when he received several parking tickets after passing his driving test. His website makes contesting tickets easier by creating individual appeals for motorists and sending them to the relevant local authority. The process takes less than a minute.
Mr Browder, from Finchley, north London, said he was “sick of councils’ overzealous approach to issuing penalties and wanted to challenge them.” He said they would issue tickets first and ask questions later.
When he came to challenge his tickets – issued by three different councils over the months – he was surprised there wasn’t a website which already existed to appeal tickets for free.
The talented student, who taught himself computer coding at 12, spent the summer building the website from scratch, skipping a summer trip to Israel in order to complete the site.
At first his website received few visits until media outlets such as the Huffington Post and the Daily Mail published articles about it. After that, his website visits skyrocketed and he attracted more than 32,000 users in one week.
He is not currently monetising the website and said he wanted it to help people avoid paying for costly services to appeal tickets. ‘The website is completely free, regardless of whether motorists win their appeal. I hope that it will disintermediate services that charge half the cost of the ticket for a manual appeal.’
Since it was launched, one London council, Camden, has had to extend its deadline to reply to appeals because it has been inundated by messages from motorists using donotpay.co.uk.
Mr Browder, who is a member of Finchley United Synagogue, has earned himself a place at the prestigious Stanford University in California to study for a degree in economics and computer science.
We see a bright future for this young man!
