Introducing CurbMinder

There is a particular kind of Los Angeles morning that CurbMinder was built to end.

It is 6:02 a.m. You are half awake, and something is nagging at you. Was today the street-sweeping day? You go to the window. The little orange three-wheeled truck is two blocks away and closing. You find your keys, your shoes are on the wrong feet, and you move your car to the other side of the street, where, it turns out, sweeping starts in fifteen minutes. You have simply relocated the problem.

Or the version where you sleep through it. That one costs $73, which is what the City of Los Angeles charges for a street-cleaning citation. Multiply that by the number of blocks in the city with posted “No Parking / Street Cleaning” signs, by the number of people who park on them, by the number of Tuesdays in a year, and you get one of the most reliable revenue streams in municipal America.

We think that is a solvable problem. So we solved it.

What CurbMinder does

CurbMinder is a small, quiet app that watches for the moment you park and then does one job well: it makes sure you never get a street-sweeping ticket again.

Here is the whole thing, start to finish:

1. It notices you parked. When your phone’s Bluetooth disconnects from your car (the same signal that means “the engine is off and you walked away”), CurbMinder wakes up. No car stereo? Tap I parked and it does the same thing.
2. It figures out exactly where you are. Not just “somewhere on Vermont,” but the specific block, and crucially, which side of the street. That side detection is the hard part, and it is the reason CurbMinder exists. (We wrote a whole technical piece on how it works.)
3. It checks the schedule. CurbMinder carries LA’s posted street-sweeping routes and the city’s official yearly cleaning calendar with it, so it knows whether your exact curb gets cleaned, and when the next one is.
4. It warns you, then it alarms you. You get a reminder that stays on your lock screen showing your block, your side, and the next sweeping time. It grows more urgent as street cleaning gets close. Five minutes before the restriction begins, a loud alarm goes off. Move the car, dismiss the alarm, go back to your coffee.

That’s it. No planning, no remembering which week it is, no squinting at a sign in the dark.

Android now, iOS soon

CurbMinder is available for Android today. You can sideload it right now, and it is on its way to the Google Play Store. A native iOS version is already built and coming shortly after: same logic, same on-device data, same idea.

We started with Android because that is where we could ship the always-on “notice when you park” behavior first. The iOS build has been developed in parallel from day one, so it is not a port we are just now starting. It is a sibling that has been growing up alongside.

A word on privacy, because it matters here

An app that knows where you park could be an app that quietly sells where you park. CurbMinder is architected so that it cannot do that, because the information never leaves your phone.

• There is no account. No sign-up, no email, no password. You install it and it works.
• There is no server. Your location is resolved to a block and a side entirely on the device, against a city-data snapshot that ships inside the app. We never receive your location, because there is nowhere for it to go.
• Your parking history stays with you. Where you have parked, and any corrections you make, live on your phone.

We do include standard crash reporting and anonymous usage analytics so we can fix bugs and understand which screens people use, but that never includes your precise location. The full details are in our Privacy Policy, written to be read, not to be survived.

One honest limitation

CurbMinder knows street-sweeping schedules. It does not know about tow-away zones, permit-only blocks, red curbs, temporary film-shoot postings, or the handwritten sign someone taped to a pole yesterday. Always check the posted signs. CurbMinder is the alarm clock for the one restriction that is hardest to remember, not a substitute for reading the curb.

Park somewhere. Walk away. Let CurbMinder do the worrying.

Never get a street cleaning ticket again.