Parking in Cambridge can be a headache. Permit-only zones, street-cleaning schedules and frequent construction mean there’s a real risk of getting a ticket or getting towed, especially for residents who rely on street parking for everyday car storage.
Cambridge has declined to tow vehicles for street cleaning since 2023, but recently doubled the ticket fee for drivers who fail to move their vehicles.
Residents Eli Silvert and Mihika Nadig understand the pressures facing Cambridge parkers. In 2022, the duo founded Tow Zone Alerts, a service that alerts Boston and Cambridge residents to street cleaning schedules in their area and allows residents to report a soon-to-be-towed vehicle. Silvert came up with the idea after being towed a number of times in Boston.
“During the Covid era, he saw that it was really tough for neighbors to alert one another about street cleaning, and they could often see it happening when they were at home,” Nadig said. “There wasn’t really a way to inform neighbors that they were going to be punished this severely.”
Now Silvert and Nadig have expanded their free service to include not just street cleaning, but any street occupancy permits granted by Boston or Cambridge. These kinds of permits are most frequently obtained for construction or moving trucks. Around 6,000 are filed each year in Cambridge, Nadig said.
Previously, the only way for residents to find out about permits near them was to walk by their vehicle and look for signs, which are required to be posted as warnings.The pair worked directly with the team behind the Cambridge Open Data Portal to get up-to-date and immediate information, which will now be sent out directly to users that sign up for the service.
This new service could ideally work in tandem with Tow Zone Alerts’ existing peer notifications, with which residents can report a vehicle that’s in danger of being towed. For instance, residents who have obtained a street occupancy permit could report an illegally parked vehicle to Tow Zone Alerts first rather than the police or a towing company, saving everyone some trouble.
Of course, this relies on the driver being signed up for Tow Zone Alerts, so Silvert and Nadig are hoping people continue to sign up. To improve the accuracy of the peer-to-peer alerts, free bumper stickers are available that explain how to alert the driver and offer a way to sign up for the service. (There are “Do I need to move my car?” and “Am I parked wrong” and magnetic or adhesive versions that can be ordered online.)
For Silvert, preventing ticketing and towing is not just a public service, but an equity issue. Over the summer, he conducted an analysis of the locations of parking tickets across Boston, finding that tickets are more likely to be handed out in lower-income regions. The inequity is compounded by the fact that parking tickets are flat fees, meaning they present a larger obstacle to people with lower incomes.
“There seems to be kind of a regressive penalty,” Silvert said.
While Tow Zone Alerts are available in Somerville and Chelsea as well, only Boston and Cambridge have street occupancy permit data available. Silvert said he reached out to the city of Somerville about accessing the data, but hasn’t heard back.
For residents that opt in, Tow Zone Alerts has also started sending out “What’s Happening” messages about local businesses and events near a user’s chosen location. Silvert said these notifications are not all sponsored, but he does see the messages as a way to help offset Tow Zone Alerts’ costs. The service’s sign-up form promises no more than one message per week.
To sign up for Tow Zone Alerts, residents can fill out their form or text “I’m in” to 844-997-4214.
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