In New York City, more than half of all parking tickets are now issued by cameras, and 57% of those tickets are paid late. Many drivers don’t even realize they’ve been fined until penalties — often 50% of the original ticket — have already been added. For those in lower socioeconomic groups, these fines can spiral into the loss of a car, and with it, a livelihood. In 2023, the city estimated $1 billion in fines remained unpaid, while thousands of vehicles were towed each year in California alone, disproportionately impacting people already on the financial edge.

The problem is clear: outdated civic systems often feel like they are designed against people, rather than for them.

A student–founder collaboration

That recognition led Columbia graduate and former Meta employee Bartek Ringwelski to launch airPark and its flagship platform, FineHero, which helps people track, pay, finance, or dispute tickets. He was soon joined by Brenton Rego, a student at NYU Stern who had encountered the concept of Creating Shared Value in the classroom and wanted to see how it could play out in practice.

Bartek led the development of the platform, which gives users the ability to receive email and SMS alerts about tickets, set up autopay, and pay in instalments, while Brenton focuses on expansion and growth opportunities, which have attracted more than 200,000 subscribers in New York, Miami, and the Bay Area. FineHero has also successfully helped users dismiss thousands of erroneous tickets. For cities, the benefits are equally tangible: faster revenue collection, fewer backlogs, and fairer processes that help rebuild public trust.

As Ringwelski frames it, “So far we’ve built a private way to pay and manage parking tickets, but long-term we want to work with cities to help them offer modern, convenient technology services. It should feel like it works for you.”

Social value in action

The social value of such a system is evident. Parking fines hit hardest at those who can least afford them, and the cascading effects — tow trucks, loss of registration, court fees — are often devastating. By giving people a simple, customer-centric tool, FineHero is helping to reduce what some have called “poverty tows” while giving cities a more efficient way to collect revenue.

This kind of shared-value framing — where a company can be both profitable and socially useful — is what drew Rego in as a student. Having grown up during the financial crisis and the pandemic, he and many of his peers are attuned to the fragility of institutions. For them, opportunities lie in rethinking the everyday systems that shape lives: parking, utilities, tolls, taxes, permits. Technology, when designed well, can make these interactions more equitable and humane.

Bridging experience and energy

For students, the hardest part of launching a venture is often the lack of experience. Investors know this, and it makes early fundraising difficult. Partnering with experienced founders like Ringwelski helps bridge this gap — bringing credibility, business acumen, and startup know-how that young social entrepreneurs can carry into future ventures.

What began with something as ordinary as a parking ticket has become a platform that improves financial inclusion, supports city efficiency, and highlights a new model of student–founder collaboration.

It also demonstrates how teams can combine different strengths. Social enterprise founders are often perceived as idealistic but lacking in business rigor. By pairing students’ passion for impact with seasoned entrepreneurs’ operational expertise, ventures like airPark show how this stereotype can be overturned.

Building trust through technology

airPark is still young, but the early results are promising. What began with something as ordinary as a parking ticket has become a platform that improves financial inclusion, supports city efficiency, and highlights a new model of student–founder collaboration.

As Rego puts it, “We are not just building software. We are building trust.”

If ventures like FineHero succeed, they will not only change how people pay fines, but also how the next generation learns to combine business with impact — one civic system at a time.