San Francisco Disables Viral Parking-Cop Tracker After Engineer Maps Tickets in Real Time

Software engineer Riley Walz launched “Find My Parking Cops,” which used predictable citation ID patterns to scrape SFMTA’s payment site and display new tickets within seconds on a live map. The site went viral within hours, drawing millions of views and hundreds of thousands of visits, before SFMTA altered access to cut off the data feed. Walz briefly restored functionality through workarounds, but the service became intermittent and is currently nonfunctional after repeated changes to the city’s systems. SFMTA says citation data should be accessed through the city’s DataSF portal and cited employee safety and prevention of disruption as the rationale for restricting the scraped feed. The project visualized officer routes and a fines leaderboard, spotlighting stepped-up parking enforcement in a city closing a reported $322 million budget gap.