Hannah Metzger
Audio By Carbonatix
For nearly a year, fighting a wrongful parking ticket in Denver has been no short of a nightmare, involving months of waiting and multiple in-person trips to the downtown courthouse.
That inconvenient process will soon finally come to an end.
A new online portal is scheduled to launch on Sept. 14, once again allowing drivers to challenge parking citations virtually, according to the Denver Department of Transportation & Infrastructure (DOTI).
This new portal comes 12 months after Denver County Court shut down the previous online portal in September 2025. The original portal closed along with the city’s Parking Magistrate’s Office when the court laid off all of its magistrates due to major citywide budget cuts for 2026. The parking magistrates were in charge of reviewing online disputes and deciding the outcomes.
Since then, if a vehicle is erroneously ticketed, the driver must go to the City and County Building during business hours to request a hearing before a judicial officer. They then must then return for an in-person hearing at a later date; drivers were forced to wait more than three months for a hearing date as of May.
The number of hearings skyrocketed after the online dispute system was eliminated. In April 2026, there were 269 final parking hearings scheduled, compared to just five in April 2025, according to data from Denver County Court.
Hannah Metzger
DOTI will review online citation disputes, replacing the parking magistrates.
The new online portal comes months later than originally anticipated. Last October, DOTI said it would roll out a virtual dispute process within the first half of 2026, or before the end of June.
The department previously said it had “no staff” available to assume the roles of the court’s parking magistrates. DOTI suffered the largest number of layoffs across all city departments last summer, losing 31 employees and eliminating 108 vacant positions.
New online portal
Beginning on Monday, Sept. 14, drivers who believe they were unjustly issued a parking ticket can challenge it online at denvergov.org/parking.
To dispute a ticket online, the citation cannot be more than 20 days old. So if a ticket is issued before Aug. 25, the driver will still have to go through the current in-person dispute process.
In the meantime, the city is advertising existing methods to make parking a bit easier.
Denver expanded two-hour parking to three hours in downtown, LoHi and along the Broadway corridor starting on Aug. 14, according to DOTI. The third hour is available after 3 p.m. at parking meters and through the PayByPhone app. Parking remains $2 per hour for the first two hours, then costs $3 for the third hour.
The “Mayor’s Park $5” downtown pilot program launched in June and is available through the end of September. Users can access downtown parking lots for $5 via the SpotHero app during certain hours, including 12 hours of parking any time on Saturdays and Sundays.
