Find SF parking cops

by alazsengul • 10 months ago

849 451 10 months ago

Very well done! Outstanding site, it is clear and easy to use. I supposed you'll be forced offline soon due to legal threats.

jacobolus• 10 months ago

If the goal is to prevent this kind of thing, it would probably be better to just not put the ticket info online, publicly visible, in real time.

sbarre• 10 months ago

It looks like this system applied security through obscurity, more or less, though.

I doubt it's the intention of the system to make all tickets "publicly visible" in this way.

I'm not sure we'll legal threats involved (who knows, hopefully not) but I suspect the city will be motivated to find some way to lock down the system to prevent this kind of enumeration attack on their database.

sealthedeal• 10 months ago

Great job!!

packeted• 10 months ago

Wow, great work. This is the kind of citizen hackery we need in society :)

PpEY4fu85hkQpn4• 10 months ago

Why do you think that a tool to help people break the rules is somehow good for society?

majkinetor• 10 months ago

It makes rules harder to break? It inspires kids to be knowledgeable because it can be cool? It teaches thinking outside the box? It makes you question your surroundings and not blindly following the rules?

AngryData4• 10 months ago

Why do you think breaking rules is automatically bad for society?

lanewinfield• 10 months ago

another riley walz banger!!!

gala8y• 10 months ago

Yeah, slowly going through https://walzr.com/. Definitely not his first rodeo.

adolph5• 10 months ago

Worth it for this jpeg:

https://walzr.com/HDR2.jpg

Lammy4• 10 months ago

Love the leaderboard feature. Relevant fee breakdown: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...

OJFord• 10 months ago

Seems weird to me (from nowhere near SF) that some of the cheapest things to do are to block fire stations, fire hydrants and 'fire lanes' (I assume that's like a bus lane but for fire engines, in places that's common enough for whatever reason, like right by a fire station?) - wheelchair/disability related stuff is much more penalised, but even all sorts of other 'regular' mis-parking seems for some reason slightly more expensive than blocking fire crews. Odd isn't it? Have I misunderstood?

Lammy4• 10 months ago

Have I misunderstood?

It doesn't count the glass shop bill when the fire fighters gleefully fuck up your car to run the hose between the side windows.

toast02• 10 months ago

'fire lanes' (I assume that's like a bus lane but for fire engines, in places that's common enough for whatever reason, like right by a fire station?)

Fire lanes are not express lanes for fire engines. They're more like reserved parking for fire engines only. Typically the curb is painted red, and you'll see markings 'no parking - fire lane'. I think of these showing up in parking lots everywhere you're not allowed to park.

Most of the parking violations are about the same level of fine. There's tiers, really big fines are for using disabled placards inappropriately, pretty big for blocking disabled parking, then blocking busses, abandoning vehicles, defaced license plate, no registration, blocking bike, then kind of everything else.

Fire lanes fit in the everything else, but they probably get more enforcement, so the low per instance fees add up if you are highly likely to be ticketted if you park in a red zone.

rcpt• 10 months ago

One of the few things that everyone in American society agrees upon is that violating disabled parking spots is egregiously wrong and should be punished fiercely

potato373284213• 10 months ago

The fine is low because the "typical case" is like a long van that's hanging over the line into the hydrant zone or something but doesn't actually block access.

They'd rather have the fine be low for the people who are actually blocking the fire lanes in spirit in order to rake in the money from the people who are only doing it in technicality.

yannk• 10 months ago

Actually... those fees are outdated. It jumped to me because for the first time in years I got a fine for "parking on grades" - Somehow I was distracted and turned my wheels the opposite direction.

So I found the fees for July 2025[1]. My fine was $108 and not $68

But also they made errors in publishing their fees, they claimed it didn't increase this year, but it did [2] - and asked the AI to find all the other inconsistencies.

So now I wonder if I should ask for $40 back. That's a dramatic increase, and seems like the intent was it to stay at $68

[1] https://www.sfmta.com/media/42628/download?inline [2] https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/3330732a-2bd1-497d-ab...

simonbolivar• 10 months ago

Love it! how do you use apple maps on web?

IncreasePosts• 10 months ago

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs/

If you're a registered apple developer you get like 250k requests/day for free

FinnKuhn2• 10 months ago

You can use "Map Kit JS". You have 250,000 free map views per day, however you need an apple developer account

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs

smith-kyle• 10 months ago

Amazing!

linehedonist• 10 months ago

Amazing. Would be even better if it kept everything in Pacific time. A little confusing to see “3 hours ago” just because I’m on the East Coast.

FinnKuhn2• 10 months ago

As someone from Europe I was a bit confused why SF parking cops seemed to only work throughout the night.

pimlottc• 10 months ago

Ah, I’m in Central, I just assume the data feed was delayed by 2 hours for reason.

throwaway936263• 10 months ago

I've thought about building something that uses CV to detect parking cops near me, but this is even better! Now just add a paid feature to send alerts when there is a cop within a certain radius of you ;)

mikeodds• 10 months ago

Thats cool. Would be nice to see annual median take from each warden.

paulsutter• 10 months ago

Nice to see historical data to show ticket density somehow (different areas have very different enforcement)

enjoylife2• 10 months ago

Officer 0336 is raking it in for the city. I wonder if there is a correlation with the areas which generate a lot of tickets and other city datasets. Perhaps crime rate or average household income?

renewiltord7• 10 months ago

It's just his area street cleaning no? You'll get whacked by that pretty easy. On a different day might be a different guy.

jeffbee5• 10 months ago

It's is amusing that you question whether parking citations correlate with crime rates. The reason they give out tickets for this is that these people have parked unlawfully.

JumpCrisscross6• 10 months ago

Traffic tickets are typically civil, not criminal.

vlovich1232• 10 months ago

Sometimes yes. I've also received tickets from parking enforcement for legal parking and good luck disputing that without getting into a lawsuit. I literally had a ticket issued at a timestamp of when I was on the other side of the city.

So there could easily be secondary correlations between areas filled with people who are willing to fight invalid citations and that might correlate with wealth / crime rates.

enjoylife2• 10 months ago

Officers are a limited resource, so their deployment matters. Are they assigned to areas that most benefit citizens, or those that most benefit the city? Is the focus on maximizing ticket revenue, or addressing the most dangerous violations, like blocked bike lanes? Are they primarily a revenue tool, a public safety measure, or just extra eyes on the street? Do wealthier neighborhoods receive more enforcement, effectively buying themselves safer streets? Basically I'm wondering does parking enforcement benefit SF residents uniformly?

potato373284213• 10 months ago

You'd really be up shit creek if parking illegally were a crime because there are all sorts of protections afforded to those accused of crimes not afforded to those accused of parking violations.

jonas21• 10 months ago

You'll probably find a high correlation with the street cleaning dataset (if there is one). Nearly all of the tickets at the top of the leaderboard are street sweeping violations.

I wonder if street cleaning is net profitable for the city once you factor in tickets. That would make cutting the cleaning frequency [1] a doubly bad idea.

[1] https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/18/san-francisco-city-hall-st...

swores3• 10 months ago

Unless a less frequent schedule makes it easier for people to forget when it's happening, leading to more people to ticket...

(Just a random hypothetical thought, I'm not saying that is the case or their motivation, only that it theoretically could be)

larkinrichards2• 10 months ago

there is -- https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Map-of-Street-Swe...

"undergoing maintenance" but spot check of data looks correct to me.

Street cleaning tickets are given efficiently and enforcement is conducted to minimize the time that people can't park. 2-4 parking officers drive in front of the street cleaning vehicles and ticket everyone parked. if you're watching at the time you'll see almost every car on the street pull out in front of the officers, circle the block and park right back in the same -- but now clean -- spot. those that don't get tickets.

fhub• 10 months ago

Some day the forward facing cameras on your car will read the street cleaning signs and warn you before you park and notify you if you are still parked there when street cleaning day/time is approaching. The nuance is that you are allowed to park after the truck has gone by (in SF).

https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/drive-park/how-avoid-pa...

renewiltord7• 10 months ago

Cool app! What a pity. I wish we had more of them here in SOMA. Big open void.

dheera2• 10 months ago

Need to pair this with an API for Tesla FSD so that cars just move themselves automatically

spankalee7• 10 months ago

Or just pay the very reasonable fee for storing your private property on public land.

dheera2• 10 months ago

I'm fine with paying the fee but

(a) It should be automatic -- if they have the tech to enforce parking like a witch hunt, they should have the tech to just charge people for parking automatically just like Fastrak and everything else. Just have parking meters look for a Fastrak transponder and charge that account for parking, and also automatically send texts to the phone number and e-mail associated with the Fastrak account if time limit is reached. Make the city a good UX. Parking payment should be a zero-effort operation. I shouldn't have to make a wager on how many minutes I'm going to take to finish my meal and risk wagering too many minutes (overpaid) or too little (get fined). Just charge me according to my actual usage.

(b) Parking signs are too goddamn hard to parse, that's the real problem.

prepend• 10 months ago

Clever how you figured out the pattern in ticket numbers and how they relate to individual officers.

ceayo• 10 months ago

Nice apple-like design, looks really good! Especially those three dots in the top-left.

pj_mukh• 10 months ago

Part of me says, “What a clever hack! Can I get a notification feature wrt where I parked?”

The other part of me says “Can we just use Public goods more responsibly instead of scratching and clawing our way through maximizing every second of monopolizing public spaces for our personal property storage”

spankalee7• 10 months ago

    > $158
    > 99 Grove St
    > 10:43 AM • Truck
    > Blocking bike lane

Thank you, Officer 0227!

jakelazaroff2• 10 months ago

Wish we had officers like that in NYC :,)

jermaustin1• 10 months ago

They're too busy parking in bike lanes.

koakuma-chan• 10 months ago

Grove Street, home

MontagFTB• 10 months ago

This is amazing. Can we get a heat map of ticket disbursements?

spankalee7• 10 months ago

Hopefully the city already has that, ideally correlated with the coverage from GPS on the officers' cars or devices.

Then they could see where they're under-patrolling and adjust their routes to fill in the gaps.

fnord77• 10 months ago

Is this real time? I don't see anything moving.

baggy_trough2• 10 months ago

What would really be incredible would be if the city made this kind of data public intentionally.

jer0me• 10 months ago

They do! There's a data set, updated daily: https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citation...

It currently has 22 million parking tickets dating back to 2008.

baggy_trough2• 10 months ago

Incredible!

Ancapistani3• 10 months ago

Huh - I don't know if I like those data being available in that format. I feel like they could probably split it up so specific plates aren't available to the public alongside the lat/long.

As it is, it would likely be an effective way to track someone's routines. All you need is a license plate and you can likely get a list of many places they've been since 2008. That's especially true since it includes citations for things like street cleaning violations, which in my experience most people will get at least once when living somewhere. I bet a lot of those plates can be tied to at least the block the owner resides with this dataset.

khuey2• 10 months ago

I'd be interested in a "loserboard", i.e. who consistently writes the fewest tickets.

jakelazaroff2• 10 months ago

The loserboard I'd be interested in is which license plates consistently receive the most tickets.

throwaway936263• 10 months ago

I'd guess the top spots are just super wealthy people who figure that at their "hourly rate", paying for parking is basically more costly than just eating the tickets. Like if someone's time is worth $10k+/hour, the parking tickets are basically just premium parking fees that are still "cheaper" than spending even a minute dealing with payment... Let your assistant pay whatever tickets you get in the mail instead.

smegma22• 10 months ago

It exists: https://www.sfmta.com/media/9654/download?inline

whiplash451• 10 months ago

The reverse engineer of the ID system is worth its pound of google riddle. Well done.

spankalee7• 10 months ago

It would be great to see more automatic payment and enforcement. It's great that buses can issue tickets for blocking bus lanes, but I would absolutely love for their to be more automatic enforcement of blocking bike lanes and meter violations.

I'm not in SF a lot these days, but I have noticed some particularly fancy parking meters that at least have tap-to-pay and might have more. Instead of a ticket, you should just be charged for how long you stay. And instead of a strict time limit, just raise the rates the longer you parks.

aidenn03• 10 months ago

Is it illegal to block bike lanes in SF? I ask because it is not illegal to do so in California, according to the learner's permit test my daughter recently took.

scottbez111• 10 months ago

The DMV is unfortunately wrong about this, with an invalid interpretation of CVC - the DMV handbook is NOT the law (it's a simplistic layman's interpretation), and is not a valid legal defense.

That said, in SF proper it's absolutely inarguably illegal as a violation called "Obstructing traffic" in the SF transportation code. A bike lane is an active travel lane for vehicles as defined under the CVC (including bicycles), and therefore stopping in one is illegal just like stopping in a car lane. I've had drivers cited for this in the past.

hedora3• 10 months ago

I read the driver’s manual a few years ago.

Fun fact: If there’s a bus or trolley car picking up passengers at the curb, you must pass it on the right in CA.

I’m almost tempted to try it when there’s no one but a cop around, and then hand the book to them when they pull me over for driving on the sidewalk.

tjohns• 10 months ago

If so, then the DMV test is (presumably) wrong. California Vehicle Code §21211 says it's generally illegal to block a bike lane:

"No person may place or park any bicycle, vehicle, or any other object upon any bikeway or bicycle path or trail, as specified in subdivision (a), which impedes or blocks the normal and reasonable movement of any bicyclist unless the placement or parking is necessary for safe operation or is otherwise in compliance with the law."

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-21211/

CVC §21209 says that you can park in a bike lane only if parking is otherwise permitted (e.g. it's a marked parking spot).

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-21209/

SF city code also lists it as a separate parking infraction: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...

Checking the DMV handbook, their description is similar. They say "it is illegal to drive in a bicycle lane unless you are parking (where permitted)" - plus turning or entering/exiting the road. [Source: CA Driver's Handbook, pp. 17, emphasis mine]

potato373284213• 10 months ago

You only love it because you have some perverted dream of 100% enforcement of whatever your rules are. In reality automated enforcement would cause an uproar and the rules would be changed to accommodate the status quo.

echelon• 10 months ago

some perverted dream of 100% enforcement

No illegally parked vehicles?

The negative externalities of illegally parked vehicles charged to the source?

I'll dream of that.

ruggeri3• 10 months ago

I believe you are being downvoted because your comment violates the guidelines ("Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously... Edit out swipes."); anyway, that's why I downvoted.

Your later comment that enforcement might benefit from latitude to be reasonable and accommodate nuance is not invalid, and you could have just said that rather than call the gp's aspiration "perverted." The expressed norm of guidelines is that your belief that the gp's logic is circular does not justify your derision.

Anyway, you will probably be more convincing to others by being less insulting.

If you don't want to contribute in adherence to the guidelines, what is the point of posting here at all?

Rebelgecko• 10 months ago

There's pilot programs to let busses self-enforce their lanes. No uproar I've seen, most people are supportive.

spankalee7• 10 months ago

I would much, much rather have the rules changed to reflect what we actually want them to be than to have bad rules that we only tolerate because we don't enforce them.

But on that note, I absolutely do think that people should pay to store their private property on public land, and that they shouldn't block bus lanes, bike lanes or cross walks, or run red lights, so I fully support those rules and automated enforcement of them.

Why do you think those rules are bad?

knowitnone33• 10 months ago

In some cities, citizens can take pictures and initiate fines when they see a violation.

jimmyl02• 10 months ago

This is super fun! The apple maps look for the "Find My" feel was a really nice touch

jshchnz• 10 months ago

this guy never misses

_2d303• 10 months ago

Oh man this is so fun but I slightly hate it. It probably won’t help people avoid parking enforcement much but it could somewhat which sucks because I think parking enforcement is a very good thing.

More, I worry about the chance a deranged person uses it to track a specific SFMTA agent who gave them a ticket.

apavlinovic• 10 months ago

This works and feels amazing. How are you doing the swipe up panel?

poorman• 10 months ago

Someone should plot this on a heat map so we can see what areas the parking cops don't write tickets for!

kami8845• 10 months ago

Amazing to see the scale of it. As a piece of feedback my assumption is that different officers are assigned to different areas and so since street sweeping is either the first and third or second and fourth week of the month for most residential areas, this will allow different officers to float to the top in different weeks. Having at least a 2 week lookback for the leaderboard is probably best. Otherwise great work!

Swizec• 10 months ago

street sweeping is either the first and third or second and fourth week of the month for most residential areas

On my block we get it 2x/week. I've never seen a street sweeper come by and the street is always dirty, but I sure have gotten tickets for leaving my vehicle out front overnight on the wrong day.

kccqzy• 10 months ago

I think the street is dirty precisely because there are vehicles out on the wrong day such that the street sweeper couldn't sweep that part of the street. Getting a ticket means the street sweeper couldn't do its job and you don't see clean streets.

gregschlom• 10 months ago

As far as I know you only get a ticket if you're actually parked there when the sweeper comes by. There's a parking cop car following the sweeper and ticketing the cars. You're allowed to re-park in the street after the sweeper has done its job, even if it's still technically street sweeping time.

So if you've got a ticket, there almost certainly was a sweeper that came by at that time.

xenadu022• 10 months ago

FWIW the sweeper comes by my street on the posted schedule. Most days one or two parking cops come ahead of the sweeper writing tickets. I have never seen them come behind the sweeper though I have seen the sweeper wait for them. I believe it is policy not to write tickets after because as other posts have noted it is perfectly legal to park right after the sweeper comes through even if it is still sweeper hours.

Of course we are on the corner and the other street does not get sweeping (it is also concrete). I assume that is because it is too steep.

obblekk• 10 months ago

This is awesome. Coolest hacker demo I've seen in a while.

scottbez111• 10 months ago

Incredible work. I'm disappointed to see so many of the leaderboard items are street cleaning tickets.

I get it - street cleaning are "easy" tickets to write in bulk, and therefore efficient ROI for PCO time, but they're not the most important violations to cite compared to safety-critical things like blocked bike lanes (which SFMTA has an official policy to completely ignore citizen reports thereof), double-parking, or red zone (including daylighting) violations.

Part of the issue is improper fine structure (though I think this is at least partly controlled by the state?) - tickets for blocking a bike lane are rarely written and therefore it's a good bet to just do it and odds are in aggregate it's cheaper than paying for parking legally.

UPS, FedEx, Amazon, Uber etc rely on this as a cheap cost of doing business, externalizing their costs onto the safety of the public. SFMTA even offers bulk payment discounts to UPS, when they should be charging escalating fines for repeat offenders.

potato373284213• 10 months ago

Incredible work. I'm disappointed to see so many of the leaderboard items are street cleaning tickets.

Why wouldn't it be? It's basically spawn camping or deer baiting or shooting fish in a barrel or whatever analogy you want to use.

scottbez111• 10 months ago

Agreed, and it provides important revenue for transportation projects and helps keep our streets clean so I wouldn't want SFMTA to adjust that focus as-is.

I just wish we had proper (read: higher, accounting for real negative externalities and likelihood of citation) fines for other violations that pose active public safety concerns such that SFMTA would be incentivized to also focus on those and not just the "easy" ones. It would also disincentivize antisocial behavior by repeat offenders.

hahahacorn• 10 months ago

On principle, I agree.

In practice, delivery vehicles don't have a place to safely stop, because that space is allocated to free street parking for private vehicles.

Subsidized street parking for cars are externalizing their costs onto UPS/Fedex/Amazon, etc. who are then passing that cost along to the safety of the public.

scottbez111• 10 months ago

Yep! Market rate for private parking, and offering subsidized short-term commercial parking (which generally has broader societal benefit than private parking) with appropriate safeguards for abuse would be great!

bahmboo5• 10 months ago

Where should the delivery trucks park if there is no infrastructure for them and the public has an ever increasing appetite for delivered products? Try to think about it from the delivery drivers point of view and their safety. The roads are not any one users exclusive resource. We all pay for them and they must be shared.

andrepd• 10 months ago

Bike lanes reduce the number of cars on the road and therefore make it easier for vehicles that are actually necessary (delivery, work, emergency, etc) to travel and park, not harder. So do all viable alternatives to driving. That in 2025 people still unironically say "just one more lane bro, and we'll solve traffic" is almost unbelievable.

scottbez111• 10 months ago

In commercial loading zones! We've allocated the color yellow for this in SF.

If commercial drivers petitioned SFMTA to convert more private parking spaces into commercial zones I'd be signing petitions and backing them in their goal 100% of the way.

But generally I've found that commercial drivers would rather just violate the law and endanger others rather than engaging in activism for better infrastructure on our streets, so it's hard to feel sorry for them if they're cited and fined as a result.

woah2• 10 months ago

One 5 minute delivery spot is as good as many regular parking spots since it won't be taken up by long term parkers. You could probably eliminate 90% of parking spots and turn the other 10% to 5 minute spots and it would be easier for delivery drivers than the status qou

AngryData4• 10 months ago

Your mistake is thinking parking tickets exist to benefit the people and create a better city. But in reality they mostly exist as an easy revenue stream for cops and courts. The fact that it incidentally helps once in awhile is just the excuse needed to keep the revenue stream alive.

primitivesuave4• 10 months ago

I did a fascinating analysis of SFMTA data a few years back. They posted a public list of names and license plates [1] that they refuse to take down, despite many emails from me over the years. I found a particular license plate that belonged to a plumber with an impeccable 5 star reputation on Yelp, whose business in SF was effectively ended by street sweeping fines. He accidentally paid the same ticket twice, which resulted in his work vehicle being towed for excessive delinquency on the original ticket, which culminated in him moving his plumbing business to Utah.

I mentioned his 5 star reputation because several people got on Yelp over the years and described situations where he wouldn't even charge them money if he could fix something in a few minutes. It was very sad to learn how the SFTMA ran an honest plumber out of our city, and still won't take his name down off the list below (even 8 years after the deadline to respond).

I don't mean to draw undue attention to that list - please bombard the SFTMA with emails to take it down, it is a very obvious invasion of privacy and laughably unnecessary.

1. https://www.sfmta.com/reports/escheatment-posting-october-20...

hn_throw_250915• 10 months ago

Reading this comment I’m stumped as to what SF can learn from this. There’s a lesson in there somewhere but I have no idea what it could be.

Oh well.

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fBoqMMPoU9k

ronsor• 10 months ago

street sweeping fines

Why the hell does SF need to sweep the streets so much?

mmmlinux• 10 months ago

From all the trash that everyone leaves everywhere. and broken glass from car windows getting smashed in. its not a nice place.

scottbez111• 10 months ago

Generally to keep streets safe to drive on, and pleasant to live near.

In particular, SF receives very little rainfall for most of the year, which means that leaves and debris easily accumulate rather than being washed away at regular intervals.

Drivers also have a tendency to leave parts of their vehicles - like broken glass and plastic/metal shards - behind when they routinely crash into each other, which accumulate on the street. Without regular sweeping, those can pose hazards to other drivers and bicyclists, and risk being washed into the bay via storm drains if not swept.

creer• 10 months ago

Why the hell does SF need to sweep the streets so much?

It does not. All the way to street sweepers zooming down the street at full speed. All the way to NOT cleaning the street before a major event. All the way to ticketing people for a specific "street sweeping" time period but zooming down the middle of the street hours later when parked cars are back. San Francisco street and sidewalks are disgusting and it's their normal condition.

What it is, is a convenient way to write lots of tickets in not much time - as mentioned all over this discussion.

arjie• 10 months ago

I have a video from a street I used to live on that might illustrate what happens in between cleanings (you'll have to turn the camera view down to face the curb to see): https://youtu.be/ew4fMB7OIyo?t=8

I think at the time the video was taken the red car had been there a while.

The video is not very high-resolution admittedly, but you can gather how things go. If you'd like, here's a screen grab https://imgur.com/a/YTymus3

Arch-TK2• 10 months ago

I'm curious, how did his name being on this list significantly affect his business?

I live in a different country and I can't imagine checking the "traffic fine registry PDF on a random government website" when considering which plumber to hire.

I don't doubt that this caused him problems, I'm just trying to understand how.

scottbez111• 10 months ago

It caused him problems because he didn't think the law applied to him, and got charged a lot of fines due to those violations.

Incurring higher costs than revenue is a common cause of business failures.

primitivesuave4• 10 months ago

I should have clarified - I only found his business through that list because I noticed his vanity license plate HPPYPPS, which corresponded to a business named Happy Pipes Plumbing which I subsequently found on Yelp.

Also, I found out about his van getting towed because I scraped towing records from Autoreturn (the city's main towing provider - lots of corruption around that deal). Autoreturn's website at the time had a query parameter like "?towid=1", so you could increment that to pull all towing records.

I started working on a pretty in-depth data analysis and visualization, similar to what was done here, but I got caught up with my day job and some rock climbing dreams. I handed over all my research to a few local reporters a while back - they were really excited to talk to me in person about it, but I haven't seen anything published since.

knowitnone33• 10 months ago

I don't understand or this makes no sense. If he paid the ticket twice, shouldn't SFTMA own him money? Why was it delinquent if he paid twice? Something does not add up in this story.

echoangle• 10 months ago

I think he got two tickets but paid one of them twice and forgot to pay the other one.

RyanOD4• 10 months ago

Where I live, many people park at intersections right up to the curb making it almost impossible to see oncoming traffic from the right or left. Really scary when you have a 16-year old driver you're trying to keep safe.

There is a very real reason why most intersections require drivers to park 20-30 feet away. Please think of the safety of others and adhere to this rule.

vhcr• 10 months ago

This is solved with better infrastructure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_extension

RyanOD4• 10 months ago

Yes, I've seen some of this. While it certainly helps, it seems like a waste of limited resources. Why can't some people just follow such a simple rule?

goopypoop• 10 months ago

the picture on that article looks like a nice stripy parking space

godelski4• 10 months ago

Great solution but until then I think the gp's point still stands.

We as humans need to ensure our actions are done with care are forethought. You can't control others but you can control yourself and influence others (like this comment attempts to do)

Plus, it's a lot cheaper for all of us if we don't need to constantly redesign once someone figures out how to "beat the game" (see Goodhart's Law). We're social creatures and the Tragedy of the Commons is a much more common occurrence than people think, especially in large cities.

Our actions affect others.

knowitnone33• 10 months ago

This is now illegal in some states

rahimnathwani10• 10 months ago

It's illegal in California but in San Francisco official policy is to not enforce this law.

If there's no red paint on the curb, they won't ticket you.

This is official policy:

https://www.sfmta.com/blog/making-enforcement-fair-our-new-p...

RyanOD4• 10 months ago

Yes, it is illegal in Washington state and yet, people do it.

Specifically, drivers who are "just running in" to grab a coffee or a pizza or whatever. What they don't understand is even a limited amount of time blocking the view of drivers can be catastrophic.

Parking up to the corner of an intersection is just a really dangerous, selfish thing to do.

pfannkuchen• 10 months ago

Hasn’t this been illegal in all states since the beginning of traffic laws?

buckle8017• 10 months ago

This rule removed something like 10% of all parking spaces in SF.

hk__22• 10 months ago

In Paris, France, they are replacing all the car parking spaces near intersections with bike ones, which is a lot better for visibility. But that’s a small-ish city where 65%+ of the population don’t even own a car.

kenmacd• 10 months ago

+11 and +4 seem check-digit-y

From the limited dataset it looks the last digit comes from:

last digit = (<sum of previous the digits> + 2) mod 7

Aloisius4• 10 months ago

It is a check digit, but it's just: n % 7.

So ticket 98494660 has citation #984,946,605

Ticket 98494661 will have citation #984,946,616

(The example of the pattern mistakenly starts with an citation number #984,946,606 which they said does not exist, rather than #984,946,605 which is the one shown in the image)

jonahx• 10 months ago

What's funny is secure IDs could have easily prevented this but, even if the city discovers it and wants to shut it down now, I'd bet actually fixing the system would be too costly (IDs tend to couple to everything).

mulmen2• 10 months ago

Just add a delay.

odensc• 10 months ago

Pretty simple fix: require more data to look up a citation, like the number, issue date and plate/VIN (this is how my city does it). Technically doesn't make the scraping impossible if you wanna try every permutation of a license plate, but makes it mostly infeasible.

Currently it just requires the sequential citation number [1], which is how the data is being scraped so easily.

[1] https://wmq.etimspayments.com/pbw/include/sanfrancisco/input...

edm0nd2• 10 months ago

super easy fix

just update all the tickets at the end of the day in one single batch / put time delay on the data

renders the site useless instantly

dcreater2• 10 months ago

wow, great work. But is this legal? Feels like no and will be takendown

dcreater2• 10 months ago

Looks like I was right - took all of 4hrs to go down.

Supercompressor• 10 months ago

FYI the ticketing time is showing incorrectly out of Pacific time, e.g. here in Eastern all recent activity shows as 3 hours ago. Not a big deal as almost all users would be in Pacific, but wanted to mention.

Great work though, this is rad.

jonny_eh3• 10 months ago

Probably a good time to tell people that SF operates a "Text Before Tow Program" where you can get a warning that you're about to get towed: https://www.sfmta.com/text-tow-program

ihaveajob• 10 months ago

This is fantastic. It really signals that the point is not to get money from you, but to free up the parking spot.

thaumasiotes• 10 months ago

They also ticket without towing, where the point is entirely to get money from you.

karlgkk• 10 months ago

I’ve long believed that “first one free” would be a great way to help reduce the impact of tickets on people while still achieving the same goal

jonny_eh3• 10 months ago

They gave me a $50 discount on the ~$600 fee for getting towed in SF due to it being a first time violation. Not quite free, but I'll take it?

sedatk• 10 months ago

This service only applies to parking more than 72-hours, blocked driveway, construction, and temporary no-parking (special event or moving truck) zones. Peak-hour tow-away lanes, hazards, yellow or white zones and other violations are not included.

Still great though. That would have saved me $500 6 years ago.

jonny_eh3• 10 months ago

It would have saved me $600 two weeks ago.

truncate4• 10 months ago

> A tow truck will be dispatched in conjunction with the text message notification and could be there in as few as five minutes.

If only they operate in good faith, and that is something I'd highly doubt given its SFMTA. As in they could call tow truck ahead of time, so that its almost unlikely the person will be able to get to their car in time.

woah2• 10 months ago

Why should roads, walkways, and construction sites be blocked just to let someone have more time to avoid a ticket? I imagine the text goes out from SF's servers simultaneously with the tow truck summons. It's a fair shot for both.

idiotsecant• 10 months ago

What does the city care? Whether it gets towed or moved by the owner it's still gone

dinkblam• 10 months ago

can you find out how much revenue the city makes each week with those tickets?

primitivesuave4• 10 months ago

No - you would have to file a FOIA request with the SFMTA, and then tabulate the "Total Paid" column in the response files. Below is my FOIA request template for the SFMTA [1] to assist anyone who is interested in doing this.

Please provide all possible information on all parking citations issued between 2009 and the present day. This should include any information related to the car (make, etc), license plate, ticket, ticketer, ticket reason(s), financial information (paid, etc), court information (contested, etc), situational (eg, time, location), and photos/videos. Specifically, please provide the most recent data from the dataset I have received in past FOIA requests, with the following headers:
Issue Year, Ticket Number, Tick Issue Date, Tick Issue Time, Agency, Tick Badge Issued, Veh Make, Veh Body, Tick VIN, Tick RP State, Tick RP Plate, Plate Exp Date, Violation, Violation Desc, Tick Meter, Tick Street No, Tick Street Name, Suspend Code, Suspend Desc, Tick Suspend Date, Tick Dispo Code, Tick Dispo Desc, Tick Dispo Date Total Paid, Total Amt Due

1. https://www.sfmta.com/public-records-requests

geor9e2• 10 months ago

You can look at the leaderboard at the end of the day and sum the daily intake if you want.

1zael3• 10 months ago

I'm missing something here. How did you get the dataset for this? And that too, in real-time?

rrrrrrrrrrrryan• 10 months ago

https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/

1zael3• 10 months ago

ahh thank you!

k8sToGo• 10 months ago

Explained here

https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/

1zael3• 10 months ago

ahh thank you!

vanshg• 10 months ago

Explained here: https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/

assemmedhat• 10 months ago

Awesome. The leading officer in the dashboard should have a raise :)

alexchantavy• 10 months ago

Oh wow this is from the same author as https://walzr.com/bop-spotter -- love these projects

rconti2• 10 months ago

I knew that domain name (which is blocked at work, for some reason) sounded familiar.

So wait.

cop-spotter is brought to you by the people who brought you bop-spotter?

beeb• 10 months ago

dop-spotter is next

barbazoo• 10 months ago

Odd detail about the page, on the left it says "Audio feed courtesy of Orchestra" but the link goes to some dystopian panopticon kinda surveillance app.

hundchenkatze• 10 months ago

I think they're being cheeky. I assume Orchestra is the dystopian company providing the "ShotSpotter" service to SF, and bop spotter is piggy backing on the api.

montag• 10 months ago

Good Lord this is cool, gorgeous Nokia UI

_giorgio_• 10 months ago

In interested in the hardware part. A microphone constantly listening. Not for the microphone, but for the IP protection, batteries etc

Jolter• 10 months ago

Edit: apparently it’s not running its own hardware. It’s piggybacking on some business called Orchestra?

samtheDamned• 10 months ago

Oh I remember this website nice to be reminded of this!

Ancapistani3• 10 months ago

This is kinda taking me aback a bit :).

I live in a small town (<15k), with the nearest city of 100k people or more several hours away. Having this degree of detail and low latency is impressive.

I happen to be in SF right now on business, and walked outside. There was an officer about a block away, right where the map said they were ~10m ago.

smurda• 10 months ago

This is why the internet and HN should exist <3

Simulacra• 10 months ago

Fascinating and good to see enforcement actually occuring

thatguymike• 10 months ago

This is great. Watch them take the data down in 3, 2, 1...

Until then I'd love to see trails of where the traffic enforcers have been on the main map, it would make the map more engaging.

Alive-in-2025• 10 months ago

Excellent idea. Data trails would really show you have are walking their beat. So the obvious next step is randomizing the IDs of the ticket writers.

typeofhuman• 10 months ago

It's down.

hk__22• 10 months ago

It’s up again.

ProofHouse• 10 months ago

Can the city just keep the top five and fire the rest, you know tax savings lol although I’d get a parking ticket, surely

hobofan• 10 months ago

Not sure if there are any tax savings to be had. Even the 100th place on the leaderboard netted $2k in a half day of working, so I think every single one of them may provide positive income for the city.

hnav2• 10 months ago

traffic enforcement is pretty much the only cashflow positive city business

neilv2• 10 months ago

Let's say that some people are opposed to the city's enforcement of parking rules against them (people who don't want parking tickets for overstaying in a spot, nor for parking somewhere they aren't supposed to).

Let's also say that some other people support the enforcement against that first group (e.g., small brick&mortar businesses, and people who want more parking available for quick errands).

If the Opposed group uses big data to work around the enforcement, does that hurt the Supports group?

What's fair in that situation?

Brian_K_White• 10 months ago

Who used big data first, who uses big data more, who has more big data to work with, who has big data they get to keep to themselves and who has to work with only big data that both have the same access to?

F this supposed see the other side question.

bko• 10 months ago

San Francisco has a system for reporting parking violations. Residents can report illegal parking such as blocked driveways, sidewalk obstructions, double parking, and abandoned vehicles through the city’s SF311 platform.

You can make a report on the 311 website, mobile app, or by calling 311. You receive a tracking number to monitor the response.

https://www.sf.gov/departments--311-customer-service-center

threatofrain• 10 months ago

Opposition must come through legal means, because the cheapness and omnipresence of enforcement is only getting better, especially for SFPD on the tech front.

appreciatorBus4• 10 months ago

Just charge market rates for land.

Overstaying (aka overconsumption) is mostly just a predictable consequence of selling something valuable at far below what its value.

nick49488171• 10 months ago

Ah yes, the free market, which tends to always work in favor of the majority of people and common good.

davmre• 10 months ago

Even if you charge $10/hr, or whatever the market rate would be for street parking spots, you still need an enforcement mechanism to prevent people overstaying.

In general, the idea of a "market rate" for any given property depends fundamentally on a system of property rights actually being enforced.

ungreased0675• 10 months ago

Perhaps the overconsumption is on the businesses that have no parking infrastructure for their customers, relying on street parking instead. What if there was no street parking allowed at all? It’s probably too late to implement this idea, but interesting to think about.

godelski4• 10 months ago

Quality public transportation

I don't mean just having public transport but make it be something people actually want to use. It has to be cheap, convenient, and useful. But even in the Bay these aren't all met. It can be hard to get to some places or quality can go down hill real quick.

I think there's these problems which are really self reinforcing. You don't build public transportation because no one uses it. No one uses it because it doesn't actually meet their needs. You don't maintain it because use usage is dropping but usage is decreasing because it's not maintained.

Then you have these external costs that are easy to ignore because you over simplify and think they are out of scope. Like you have to have more parking spaces for more cars. Less green spaces. This all raises the cost of the real estate. So on and so on. There's more complexity than we often think and we should start with our simplifications but to improve we need to consider the complexities we initially ignored

morkalork• 10 months ago

Hey @OP, make a leader board for the license plate with the most infractions

obventio562• 10 months ago

I would pay ~$10/month for email alerts when an officer is within a geofence of my car.

ThePowerOfFuet• 10 months ago

Then someone will know where your car is at all times, and probably who you are... and that is monetizable (not from you).

Zigurd• 10 months ago

Google maps is free to use so obviously I'm the product Google sells. I'd say I'm getting a fair deal letting "them" track my location. (Why does nobody ever complain about them insisting on gender neutral pronouns? They must be very powerful.)

jaggederest• 10 months ago

If you do not believe that is already true on multiple axes, you are probably mistaken. The combination of automated license plate scanners, phone beacon data, and behavioral metrics make that relatively straightforward to get, in aggregate.

I worked on a project where we could tell how many users were in a given store at a time (historically, not realtime) based on wifi traces, mobile data aggregation from carriers, and bluetooth pings. We could generally back it up to even general demographic data like how much disposable income the users were likely to have. Interesting project, deeply worrying how much data is running around out there.

obventio562• 10 months ago

If there is someone who wants this data, I am happy to sell... no need for a middle man.

AngryData4• 10 months ago

Someone probably already does. Every car sold within the last 20 years has tracking electronics and can be remotely crippled or shut down.

giarc• 10 months ago

Officer 0438 appears to have begun his shift in Guadalajara

https://imgur.com/a/u4hg8DS

uyzstvqs• 10 months ago

Appears to have been given on 3 El Dorado South, San Francisco. The map marker shows a street called Avenida South San Francisco, Mexico, in front of a bar called El Dorado.

supportengineer2• 10 months ago

It's quite common for Bay Area workers to have a "supercommute"

RS-2323• 10 months ago

Don’t give ICE any ideas!

madamelic• 10 months ago

Oh my god. A $107 ticket for an EXPIRED METER?!

That's insanity. Turns out more than just thieves are thieves in SF.

nycdatasci• 10 months ago

How are you handling the auth token/captcha on the website? I'm not a legal expert, but my impression is that automated solving of captchas during a scrape carries higher risk. That said, amazing project!

devadvance• 10 months ago

Very cool! There are a ton of opportunities like this with SF systems!

For folks wondering about the public nature of this data: SFMTA separately publishes a full data set daily: https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citation...

lavela• 10 months ago

Great implementation but reading the comments I wonder if there is really no sense of the streets as a commons you should use responsibly at all in the US.

Not that I am not annoyed by parking tickets, but I am also thankful for the enforcement when I use any means of moving through the city other than a car and at least where I live parking violations are really under-enforced. Maybe that's the difference in San Francisco?

hnav2• 10 months ago

Very little of that anywhere in the country, especially when it's the rights of drivers vs other road users. San Francisco is a bit better but gets bad when it goes through its boom cycles that bring lots of people in.

smegma22• 10 months ago

I agree with the sentiment but I want to point out that a car is not essential for most people living in SF, although many people outside the city think this. Around 35% of households don’t have a car: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...

nick_• 10 months ago

Nope, same in Toronto. Same everywhere I've been. Drivers all mentally turn into teenagers when it comes to anything to do with driving/parking. I'm very pro traffic and parking enforcement.

PpEY4fu85hkQpn4• 10 months ago

[flagged]

bfrink• 10 months ago

Seems that something's been broken. The normal way to look up ticket images manually at https://wmq.etimspayments.com/ no longer works, returning "Unauthorized" even after properly getting past the CAPTCHA.

geor9e2• 10 months ago

"each possible ticket number follows a pattern: add 11, except add 4 if the last digit is 6…Only God knows why"

That pattern feels suspiciously like how a tacked-on modulo check-digit would act.

It seems the real citation number, x, excludes the last digit, and you only needed to +1 increment to it.

Then they tack on a last digit, a check-digit, of (x+1) mod 7. That would be the same pattern.

The contract for the system does have the clause "validate the data transcribed from handwritten Citations…a check-digit algorithm to control errors in the Citation number field" https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...

refurb• 10 months ago

Nice observation!

Aloisius4• 10 months ago

It's just x % 7.

They started their example pattern with an citation number 984,946,606 they earlier said wasn't valid rather than 984,946,605 given initially (and shown in the image).

pertsix• 10 months ago

But why?

xvedejas• 10 months ago

In college we discovered everyone's ID number was evenly divisible by 13. Presumably it's because that's the smallest number you'd need so that you could detect any one digit being incorrect, or two adjacent digits being swapped (I think?). Or that it's just very easy to implement the increment when assigning new numbers.

nielsole• 10 months ago

Isn't 11 the smallest divisor that gives those guarantees?

cramcgrab• 10 months ago

Division I, Section 7.3.3 Obstruction of Traffic Without Permit $1,000.00

“officer, I’ve got a permit to obstruct traffic!”

zacharycohn• 10 months ago

Yes, things like street closures for construction, film shoots, or Neighborhood Night Outs would all need permits to obstruct traffic/close the street.

xenadu022• 10 months ago

Fun fact: as a regular citizen you can apply for such a permit online. I did this when we were moving houses to ensure the entire block in front of our house would be clear of cars (or we could tow if required) to make it possible to get a moving truck in on the one-lane street where double-parking would block all access. I filled out the forms. A week or so later the city dropped signs on the sidewalk warning of the upcoming closure.

You can also close your entire street for a block party. You just need a certain number of people on your block to sign the form approving it.

varenc6• 10 months ago

site now offline:

In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live. I can't get data from it anymore.

nomagicbullet• 10 months ago

RIP In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live. I can't get data from it anymore.

That was fast! I missed it.

rahimnathwani10• 10 months ago

If you are happy with fewer columns and 5-day-old data, you can find it here: https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citation...

larkinrichards2• 10 months ago

offline now. It's a reasonable to expect that this information should not be available in real time to protect parking officers. It's already published daily, as mentioned in other comments.

drstewart• 10 months ago

Funny, people don't think it was reasonable for the FAA to do the same with protecting private citizens travel data

malux85• 10 months ago

In my early career NZ traffic cops used to walk around with a Bluetooth printer strapped to their belt, that would print the tickets.

I purchased a long range (I think 400m) Bluetooth dongle and with a bit of bash scripting we could continuously sweep the local area and then go out and move our cars, we tried pairing to the printers too but they had passkeys and we couldn’t, but they still had whatever broadcasting was active so we could at least detect them.

xg15• 10 months ago

Misread as "parking coops" and thought this was some interesting new concept of community-owned parking lots.

ndgold• 10 months ago

So incredibly cool I want this

nodesocket• 10 months ago

$105 fine for street cleaning violation? What an absolute racket for the city. I used to live near Union Square 7+ years ago and left for greener pastures in the south. So glad I left when I did.

aendruk• 10 months ago

In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live. I can't get data from it anymore.

Anyone have a screenshot?

rimbo789• 10 months ago

There should be a tracker on all cars that automatically charges them a fee when they stop on public land for longer than a traffic light. You get mailed the bill monthly. Fail to pay you lose your license.

renewiltord7• 10 months ago

Tolled roads? Oh yes. With surge pricing? Ah fuck yeah. Come on!

xbar• 10 months ago

It was great while it lasted.

jcalvinowens4• 10 months ago

I gotta say, it's incredibly inconsiderate and thoughtless to publish the real time location of a bunch of public safety officers in an individually identifiable way.

I understand the sentiment, and I appreciate the hackery... but you put these people at risk today. You need to think much more carefully about how you approach things like this in the future.

dymk3• 10 months ago

I’m playing the world’s smallest violin for those poor parking enforcement officers

blactuary• 10 months ago

Parking enforcement is unequivocally good and these people are not regular cops

RS-2323• 10 months ago

I disagree. There should be no expectation of privacy for any public officer. Things like this website, body cameras, and FOIA requests are all for the public good. Expose corruption and keep everyone safer with a little accountability.

jcalvinowens4• 10 months ago

That's a false dichotomy.

There is a world difference between everything you mentioned, and publishing the real time locations of officers by their actual name (initials) on a website anybody can visit.

dragonwriter2• 10 months ago

There should be no expectation of privacy for any public officer.

So live public webcams in the employee restrooms in all government buildings?

I would argue that public officers would retain personal privacy, but that such privacy cannot be a shield against the public for the government concealing substantive operations, and that the identity of public officers and the substantive means by which they are engaged in the exercise of public functions, are therefore not within the space of their personal privacy.

crazygringo4• 10 months ago

Accountability in terms of what has happened in the past, yes.

But the idea that current public locations of identifiable public officers is not justifiable at all.

That would be allowing individuals to be stalked in real time. That's not OK.

notatoad2• 10 months ago

there is no public good afforded by violating parking restrictions. the public good comes from enforcing them, so that parking spaces turn over quickly and remain as available as possible.

circumvention of the rules for a priveleged few (like those who know how to surveil the enforcement officers) is actual corruption. this service doesn't expose corruption, it enables it.

bobanrocky• 10 months ago

Thats a silly observation. Reasonable privacy is a reasonable expectation for anyone in the US.

throwmeaway2223• 10 months ago

Then you should also have no problem with an app that helps people spot and identify people that break into cars, imo a much larger problem in SF than parking spot thieves.

varenc6• 10 months ago

There should be no expectation of privacy for any public officer

It's worth noting that SF Parking Control Officers aren't "police" by most any definition. They're not sworn, and they don't qualify as peace officers under California law. They can't execute warrants, make arrests, or carry firearms, etc. They work under the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), not the SFPD.

Their enforcement powers are limited to issuing parking citations, ordering tows, and directing traffic. About the only thing they share with actual police is the word "Officer" in the job title. Tracking these folks is about equivalent to tracking individual USPS employees.

Aachen4• 10 months ago

Any public officer, so also the spies you have in Russia, the investigators on murder cases, really everyone should have no privacy whatsoever in your mind?

bumseltagbaerbi• 10 months ago

Everyone, just not officers?

As soon as the bodycams oh so requested by the Left were worn, it became slowly clear who the majority of perpetrators are in Cops vs. Blacks, Antifa, white liberal women... Now the Left's opinion seems to turn against these.

Barbing2• 10 months ago

Thank you for thinking about the safety of our neighbors.

May I ask whether you've considered the unique vehicles the parking enforcement agents use?

SFMTA is hard to miss in their 3-wheelers--believe it's the Westward Industries "GO-4" Interceptor. I may have a blind spot here (like someone with access to an armed drone fleet could have made use of the map?), but essentially all private citizens will see these unmistakable three-wheelers simply by opening their front doors or heading downtown. Or into most any neighborhood.

For others reading this besides you, what additional safety burden could be presented by this map which is absent simply with any of the 800,000 pairs of human eyeballs in SF? (Here to learn, no snark!)

varenc6• 10 months ago

The 800,000 pairs of human eyeballs aren't hooked up to a public real-time reporting system? Functionally, this is pretty different. Could argue either way.

jcalvinowens4• 10 months ago

The website enabled stalking individual city employees by their initials in real time.

If it just showed where the cars were, that would be much better. Although still questionable IMHO.

greesil• 10 months ago

Tut tut. What's the threat model?

neilv2• 10 months ago

I agree. And we should also be similarly conscientious about the privacy of everyone else as well.

(Even though respecting privacy would mean that a massive number of HN techbros would quickly be unemployed.)

EasyMark• 10 months ago

We'd probably care if they weren't tracking us whenever they get a chance.

notJim• 10 months ago

You think the SF parking enforcement agency is tracking everyone?! That's one of the wilder conspiracy theories I've heard recently.

potato373284213• 10 months ago

Most states have a public real time map showing snow plow locations. Ask yourself why is it not a problem when their info is public.

At the end of the day what this comes down to is the current scale of parking tickets being something that needs to be backed by more violence (i.e. deploy actual cops with all their associated costs) than society would tolerate (people would complain about costs, request the resources be spent elsewhere, etc).

pyronite• 10 months ago

Most states have a public real time map showing snow plow locations. Ask yourself why is it not a problem when their info is public. From what I’m reading, I imagine it’s because the snow plow trackers don’t individually identify their operators as this seems to.

more_corn2• 10 months ago

“Public safety” they write tickets to generate revenue. Nothing they do benefits public safety.

truted2• 10 months ago

I know this isn't federal jurisdiction but ever since reading the executive order issued yesterday and the quite vague description of what is Antifa I wonder if this type of interference/obstruction of law will start to be prosecuted.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...

tdeck• 10 months ago

It's vague on purpose. Just like MS13 or Tren de Aragua, it can be whatever they want it to be.

aussieguy1234• 10 months ago

Excellent work. It would be great to have this in my city. Parking cops can't be everywhere at once.

Generally I don't bother paying for public parking and just risk the fine unless I know i'm in an area with a lot of parking officers (i.e. my local CBD), I find I actually save more money this way.

Some charges are insane, like $10 per hour to park near the beach in a richy rich suburb - unless you are one of the local wealthy residents, then its free.

Perhaps this could be combined with some kind of SMS alerts, i.e. if I park at a location I can be alerted if a fine is issued?

esbranson• 10 months ago

lightning speed, the SF government changed

The most impressive thing about this. Not to diminish Riley Walz's work, which is also impressive.

joshfraser• 10 months ago

There are a ton of interesting use-cases for public city data. When I was an Airbnb host, I built an early alert system to send me email if my address was ever reported or under investigation. The government moves at a snails pace, so anyone who was paying attention would have plenty of time to cure any issues before any formal investigation was even started. I even had a personal dashboard showing how the enforcement office operated, how many investigators they had, which neighborhoods were getting the most enforcement actions, stats on how cases were resolved, how long they took, etc.

felgueres• 10 months ago

For those in sf who want a reminder app to avoid street cleaning parking tickets, I built this app last year:

https://streetcleaningparking.com

psawaya• 10 months ago

Looks like it's back up! https://x.com/rtwlz/status/1970722519918498102

thisOtterBeGood• 10 months ago

You could imagine that it won't work for long after publishing this. I would've either used it for myself and my friends or messaged the city about this straight away, so they can avoid things like that.

I don't like these kind of apps that allow people to be smart around regulations that should apply for everyone.

4gotunameagain• 10 months ago

I would've either used it for myself and my friends
I don't like these kind of apps that allow people to be smart around regulations that should apply for everyone.

varenc6• 10 months ago

I suspect is the source of the data: https://prdwmq.etimspayments.com/pbw/include/sanfrancisco/di...

The online tool that lets you pay a citation doesn't list the citation's address, but that one above does. It's protected with a CAPTCHA, but a very weak one that's definitely no longer effective in our current era.

My guess is the company SF hires to handles their parking citations will deploy reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare's anti-bot very soon. Though might be complicated given all the legal compliance stuff.

---

This is the company SF and many others use to handle citations: https://www.conduent.com/

brochure about their parking product: https://downloads.conduent.com/content/usa/en/brochure/total...

varenc6• 10 months ago

According to twitter they deployed cloudflare!

https://x.com/rtwlz/status/1971003420317520042

nmeofthestate• 10 months ago

Don't think I've ever seen traffic wardens referred to as "parking cops" before. Is that a common usage in America?

ajoshu• 10 months ago

I seen a post about this on insta this morning, awesome project, of course it's SF

VoidWhisperer• 10 months ago

Top comment might be inaccurate now - it seems that the site is showing recent data again (as recent as 24 minutes ago).

ramon156• 10 months ago

+1 working again

mutator• 10 months ago

The quality of the outcome of the street cleaning process is at best meh. Certainly not worth the high dollar amounts they are charging for the fees.

Find SF parking cops

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