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2h ago

San Francisco Pulls Parking Ticket Data After Viral Site Tracked Officers in Real Time

Officials said limiting access protects parking officers and prevents disruption to enforcement.

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Pedestrians pass by a parking enforcement vehicle on Mission Street. Photo by Marina Newman.
Parking control officer Dan Ryan cites a vehicle for parking illegally in front of a residence in San Francisco in 2022. A new app shows parking tickets being dispensed in the city in real time.
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Overview

  • Riley Walz, a 23-year-old software engineer, launched “Find My Parking Cops” on Tuesday to map citations and trace parking control officers almost as tickets were written.
  • Roughly four hours after launch, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency changed its public citation pages, cutting the data feed and rendering the site inoperable.
  • SFMTA said it welcomes creative technology that encourages legal parking but acted to ensure employee safety and avoid interference with their work.
  • Walz reverse engineered predictable citation ID sequences to scrape the SFMTA payment portal and built a leaderboard showing some officers issuing more than $15,000 in fines in little over a day.
  • Data displayed by the site showed heavy clustering downtown and hotspots like the Mission and Mission Bay, surfacing enforcement patterns as SFMTA increases ticketing while confronting a roughly $322 million budget gap.