Russian news website The Village got sick of douche parking (apparently a big problem there) and decided to do something about it. How? By using an iPhone app tied into social media sites.
The app lets users snap photos of badly parked cars and upload them, but what happens next is pure genius.
It’s hard to know whether this is parody or not, but a quick look through The Village certainly shows a site with social responsibility, so I’m betting it’s for real, at least as a publicity campaign.
Once you have snapped a photo, the license plate of the offending car, along with its model and color, is recognized by the app and uploaded along with its location. Then a 3D model of the car is generated and served up as an annoying popover "ad" in the browsers of people in the area (targeted using their IP addresses). Thus, local people are alerted to morons in their neighborhood.
The only part I don’t like is that you are forced to share the ad on a networking site to remove the ad.
The idea is to embarrass bad parkers and make the practice socially unacceptable. I’d love to use this app in Barcelona, where I live, to out people who park in the bike lanes. Then again, I already have a pretty effective weapon — it’s called "hawking a loogie."
