Overview

• 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.