TowIt App (for Park Shaming!)

Anyone use TowIt? It looks like it might have been developed in Canada..?

I've never heard of anyone using this in Chicago (yet).

http://www.thestar.com/business/2015/01/19/towit-pitches-a-digital-...

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Permalink Reply by Tom Z on April 27, 2015 at 2:02pm

Bring this to Chicago...

I just tried to load towit.io website, looks like it's down.

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Permalink Reply by Michael McArthur on April 28, 2015 at 2:56am

Hey there,

Co-Founder of TowIt here (yay Google Alerts). We've had a single report in Chicago a few weeks ago. That said, we've been getting hundreds of downloads from across the USA over the last 48 hours or so. The app works all over the world.

If you are experiencing problems with the newspaper's link above please try going to the regular version of the site at http://tow.io. I assume you are using the latest version of chrome and they do have a security certificate bug in that build that for some reason conflicts with the SSL version of our site.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Z on April 28, 2015 at 3:04pm

It's working now... There may have been a hick-up at the time... I believe it was a server error 500, but all is good now.

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Permalink Reply by Michael McArthur on April 28, 2015 at 6:00pm

Strange, sorry about that. Maybe CloudFlare. :S

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Permalink Reply by Anne Alt on April 28, 2015 at 6:11am

Also on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/towitapp

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Permalink Reply by Sam A. on April 28, 2015 at 10:15am

That's a start, Michael! Can you speak to what kind of reception your app has from US traffic authorities? That's great the downloads in the US are rising but seems like the critical piece is getting our cops to want to use the service too.

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Permalink Reply by Michael McArthur on April 28, 2015 at 6:04pm

The only solid US connection we've had thus far (since we started development a few months ago) is from an officer in the City of San Luis Obispo, California. He wants to chat this week about implementing a real-time solution and promoting the app in said city. He seems keen!

We likely have to start small and prove it "works" in big cities; as such, this is a small but great step.

The more users we have, and usage we have, the more powerful it makes us when it comes to presenting ourselves to various municipalities around the globe. It's one of those "if you build it they will come" things...

We're cyclists ourselves, and we get it.

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Permalink Reply by Haddon on April 28, 2015 at 1:42pm

Anything that ups the antagonism is a bad idea. And this app will do about as much good as car alarms.

A towing costs a ton of money ($250?) it's sort of a dick move to jam someone who could be working, could have kids, struggling to get by, any number of other things. 99% of drivers do just fine, getting pissy on account of 1% of drivers is just pretty / petty ego-centric. I think a couple years ago we didn't have lanes and now everyone is getting pretty entitled about them.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Z on April 28, 2015 at 3:06pm

If there parked in a tow area they should get a ticket and possibly get towed.

Drivers who follow the rules shouldn't have a problem.

As both a driver and cyclist, I like this idea.

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Permalink Reply by Michael McArthur on April 28, 2015 at 6:07pm

We advise all users to use precaution and to be as "stealth" as possible when using TowIt. There's no need to let the driver know what you've done or captured. Take your picture (you can even try to get a friend to fake pose so it's less obvious- something) and move along.

We don't actually tow yet. We don't have those connections in place. If it were to ever happen we would hope that it's only to repeat offenders, and said offenders would learn their lesson after a single tow.

The mere existence of TowIt has the potential to be a major deterrent to this selfish behavior, if only enough people knew about it.