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.
It's what quite a few banks used to use as a check digit, maybe that where you remember it from. But it depends on the size of the number you want to verify and exactly what system is employed. Lots of banks used 9 or 10 digit numbers which worked with a "11 check". Nine was also often used on smaller numbers.
You can use any prime afaik for this example but your number space will be limited.
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).
Because it means that 85.7% of all mistakes will be caught by very simple software checks before getting to your system. (85.7% == 6/7).
Check digits in your userdata is an old trick and is very useful in practice. Maybe modern systems should aim for something better than %7 but it's a good starting point as a system design concept.
Just a mistake, I imagine. Probably just typed the pattern out starting with the last number they wrote, which unfortunately was invalid.
> I was looking at ticket 984,946,605. When I type in 1 higher, 984,946,606, no ticket is found. ... So the ticket after 984,946,606 is actually 984,946,610
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> They work under the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), not the SFPD.
The other points are valid, but note that California’s main general purpose state police force (CHP, which also absorbed the named-as-such State Police in 1995) is part of the State Transportation Agency, so being organizationally subordinated to a transportation agency is not really evidence of not being “police” in the normal sense.
Tracking the location of the truck delivering your package sounds pretty useful. And UPS/Amazon already do this. But publishing the individual personal location of each of the 500,000 USPS employees in real-time while they're working... is a bit different.
If you track them while working you’ll focus on hourly productivity rather than annual productivity and customer satisfaction. My postman has literal love letters by children written on houses on the block, makes sure you never loose any important documents, and so generally amazing, and I’m sure if you looked at his « number of houses per hour » metric it’d look bad.
There's a difference between being in public and being tracked.
Of course they don't have expectations of privacy in terms of people being able to e.g. take photos or videos of them. The same way people can take photos of you or me.
But broadcasting someone's real-time location to the whole world all day long, in real time, is something else entirely. That has never been considered part of being in public. That's targeted surveillance, which is very, very different.
It should be noted that SFMTA, the alleged victim of this website, uses a network of 400+ Flock ALPR cameras to track the movement of every vehicle in the region. They're able to do this not because of some special agency authority, but because it's legal for anyone to surveil public areas.
It might be fair, but is it a good idea? What you are doing is justifying something you wouldn't agree with because it targets people belonging to an organization doing the thing you don't agree with. That is can be problematic because
1. They now can say 'well it is done to us why can't we do it to others' instead of engaging with real arguments about using ALPR flock cameras to track people
2. You assume that a person working for an organization is automatically complicit in the decisions of that organization and is therefore fair to be targeted by systems you don't want targeted at yourself -- this is fine when in war or other struggles deemed worthy of placing aside normal human morality temporarily, but is this one of those?
3. This type of thing can turn into a race to the bottom where each side escalates compromises of their basic value systems
> Of course they don't have expectations of privacy in terms of people being able to e.g. take photos or videos of them. The same way people can take photos of you or me.
Might be a culture difference with europe but I find it rude if someone would take a picture of me without asking. I can think of few purposes (stalking, facial recognition training or tracking, sharing in a chat group to make fun of) that you can do with a picture of a random person on the street that you'd not get permission for when you're required to ask
It's always a balance: if someone wants to do it for legal reasons (I just stole their purse and am running away) that's very different. There's almost no law that works absolutely anyway, there can very often be overriding reasons that are already defined in the law (or another law) or that a judge will accept. Just talking about the default case
Of course it's rude. But we don't criminalize behavior that is merely rude. It's rude to swear at someone or fart in their direction too.
In public, US courts have established you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Because you're in public. Someone can take photos or videos of you, whether you're in the background or whether they're zooming in on your face.
Obviously if you're getting right up in their face and refusing to go away, that turns into harassment and you can call the cops. But it doesn't matter if you're using a camera or not.
How do you think these public officials with massive paychecks and life long massive pensions operate; they drive around in the most noticeable little vehicles that you can spot from a mile away. If you needed to track them for some reason you would just follow them, and most likely people in the neighborhood probably already know their routes anyways.
It seems you are fixated on something you just can’t let go, as if these are some kind of undercover agents selling kidnapped and trafficked young children and he’s blowing their cover … they’re writing traffic tickets off $480 dollars … the least we spoiled be able to do is track the public official while they’re writing excessive fines.
What the cost of living inside SF is, is irrelevant to the matter. As city employees they also have other benefits related to commuting and no one makes them commute into the city for that job that pays at minimum $70k and up to $100k in a country where the average wage is $39k...the average...and it is for *checks notes* driving around, looking, and pushing buttons all day.
You seem to lack perspective, probably because as most here, we all likely make well above what the average person makes around us. It can be forgiven as ignorance, but it's the same thing as the people around me who are worth 9+ figures who flatter their multiple staff with all kinds of pleasantries and benefits while paying them 6 figure salaries out of an odd poorly understood "guilt" or something that is prevalent among those who are better off than others.
I get your point, but reality is that under no objective perspective is $100k a bad income for what they do, especially since those "officers" pull in $90 million per year in citations.
But to answer your question, no, you will not be living in Sea Cliff on even $100k, but seriously, let's put into perspective what someone who drives around, looks, and then pushes buttons to print out a paper should be making. How many other people could be doing that job. I guarantee that it's not even a competitive position that hires in the best interest of the public.
You seem to be the one lacking not just perspective but correct facts.
> for that job that pays at minimum $70k and up to $100k in a country where the average wage is $39k...the average...
Where are you getting an average of $39k from? The OECD lists 2024 US average salary as $82,933 [1].
So this is a job that pays from less than average to a bit more than average nationally.
But, the mean hourly wage in San Francisco is $48.15 [2], which is slightly over $100K annually. Which makes it a job that pays from well below average to average at best.
> and it is for *checks notes* driving around, looking, and pushing buttons all day.
You clearly have no concept of the kinds of dangerous physical encounters cops have with scary, crazy, threatening, lunatic people on a regular basis.
> You clearly have no concept of the kinds of dangerous physical encounters cops have with scary, crazy, threatening, lunatic people on a regular basis.
Parking enforcement people are not police officers, nor do they have any of the powers of one.
If you don't think this tool poses any risk to these people let's try walk through a scenario.
Let's say someone sees a parking warden they find physically attractive. They follow them for a bit and when they write up their next ticket, the stalker pulls up this app to get the officer's ID. The next day they pull up the app to see where the warden is working that day - they drive over there, and it takes them maybe half an hour to find the warden based on the lag between last-ticket-location and real-time-location. They strike up a creepy conversation and the parking warden eventually leaves, disturbed. The next day, the parking warden is working a night shift - they've been told to patrol a dark neighborhood where there are plenty of alleyways that nobody can see into...
See where I'm going with this?
Anything which allows someone to get ongoing location data for a person who they've just come across on the street is inherently a danger to the surveilled person.
More likely someone gets a ticket that's bullshit, winds up paying, and this happens enough that they have their buddy wait for the person and throw a brick at them or something.
This is a wild hypothetical that tries to blame a tool for the problem of a user. Won’t anyone think of the children?
Let’s modify your post to highlight the absurdity:
Let's say someone sees a parking warden they find physically attractive. They follow them for a bit in their car and when they write up their last ticket, the stalker gets in their car and follows the officer back to the station and then to their home. The next day they pull up to the warden’s house and follow them to see where the warden is working that day - they drive over there. They strike up a creepy conversation and the parking warden eventually leaves, disturbed. The next day, the parking warden is working a night shift - they've been told to patrol a dark neighborhood where there are plenty of alleyways that nobody can see into...
See where I'm going with this?
Anything which allows someone to follow a person in a vehicle who they've just come across on the street is inherently a danger to the surveilled person.
For anyone else looking for which of these 200 words are actually different, this second post follows the person home instead of using the tracking website method
There's a gigantic difference in the ability of the surveilled person to protect themselves in the scenario you sketch versus the one that I sketch. In your scenario the surveilled person has a chance of noticing the fact that somebody is physically following them. And when they have eyes on the stalker, they can call the police to come and address the situation when they predict the stalker might escalate.
In the scenario that I sketch, the stalker runs zero risk while obtaining the information. Hell, they don't even have to log in to this tool, so there's zero record of who accessed location information for which parking warden.
And yes, it is absolutely incumbent upon the creators of tools to take into account how they might be misused. To pretend that all humans are of right mind and incapable of doing harm and only design for the case of ethical use is laughably naive.
What a strange line to draw when in both hypothetical scenarios the stalker actively engages in a creepy conversation with the target before “you see where I’m going with this?” happens.
Tracking enforcement officials decreases their ability to enforce and makes them easier to target.
ICE agents shouldn't be doing their enforcement. Deserve to be targeted, and given there is very little transparency to their actions, anything to check their actions is an improvement.
SF parking cops are not evil, operate transparently, and limiting their capability to enforce is not important to keep rule of law applicable.
Public officer tracking apps can be okay, but only if you deem those public officers to be severely lacking in public oversight, and massively overreaching in their enforcement.
>Tracking enforcement officials decreases their ability to enforce and makes them easier to target.
Why is that a bad thing? God forbid the enforcers only have the effective power to enforce where there is sufficient local support that they feel safe doing so. Sounds like a pretty effective check on power to me.
There was a case in my city a few years ago where the state police pulled someone over, found the passenger had weed on his person was in the process of arresting him but had to abort and he fled on foot because they initiated the stop in a supermarket parking lot at a busy time and the passers by were numerous and displeased enough the officers felt unsafe.
I get that people get their panties in a knot over the idea that the government might have less practical ability to enforce petty civil nuisance stuff like parking but the flip side of this is that when you need serious resource investment to do things people don't like (like arresting weed dealers, ICE raids, etc), you do a lot less of it. And that's a tradeoff that I think is very worth making.
I mean it's only fair, I would prefer that both ordinary people and public officials were granted privacy in public spaces, but we don't so they don't.
Citizens can't hold public officials accountable when they're only accountable to other public officials.
So take this to the maximum, lets say in 30 years (honestly probably a lot sooner) - should police have trackers on them that give YOU accurate up to the second 3d/GPS location of all of them and done in an app that's attached to a drone that shoots people. Since they are in public this is the obvious thing you're looking for.
Keep in mind the site doesn’t track officers in real time, it reports the last location and timestamp of a ticket.
Realtime police officer location data would interfere with arrests and investigation, but realtime reporting of incidents is critical public data that shouldn’t be fear mongered away.
If officers giving tickets are in fear of their life, taking down a tracking website isn’t the change that keeps them safe...
I'm trying to show how people on here are saying because someone is in the public we are owed exact xyz location data of said person is fucking ridiculous.
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.
I have some sympathies for your argument, but I suspect you are trying to prove too much: your argument could more or less justify an infinitely large fee for parking violations (or even imprisonment). Most people seem happier with small, finite amounts for these things?
As a second point, I don't think parking and public goods have anything in common. Parking is _not_ a public good, and shouldn't be treated as such. Parking spaces are rivalrous and excludable. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good for the background.) They should be provided by the private market just as any other good and service, instead of being heavily regulated and partially being provided free-to-the-user at the cost of tax payers and business owners.
> 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.
While personal privacy may be preserved outside the scope of public acts, an individual who, in the execution of official duties, operates vehicles displaying lights or sirens and wears official identification inherently waives any claim to geospatial privacy.
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.
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?
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.
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!)
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.
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).
> 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.
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?
> '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.
Brother in law is a firefighter, gleefully is exactly the correct term here. According to him getting to bust windows to run the hose is literally their favorite thing to do. To the point where even if they don't actually need to, or it would be slower, they'll still do it. It's apparently a matter of principle.
I think apsurd interpreted Lammy’s post as a complaint, like the firefighters are too gleeful.
Then apsurd is pointing out that there’s no reason to complain, and they shouldn’t waste time with remorse.
I don’t think Lammy actually meant it as a complaint, though, which ended up making apsurd’s correction confusing.
Anyway, I think everyone in the thread agreed: park in front of the fire hydrant and nobody feels bad but you as you get your window smashed. Broad anti-fire consensus.
My dad, former firefighter, age 83, likes to tell this story of someone parked in front of a hydrant and them running the hose through the car. He’ll be happy it’s stood the test of time.
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.
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
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
Pretty sure it varies depending on where you live. iirc When I was in SF the tickets would get distributed ahead of time and the sweeper would follow within an hour or so. Once the sweeper went by you were free to re-park.
In Oakland, there are different vehicles that come by for different purposes. As I understand it there’s an agitator, sprayer, and sweeper. You have to know when the whole process is complete, so I understand it’s easier just to avoid for the whole window.
The parking enforcement happens before the street sweeper comes. There’s usually four or five of them and they’re several blocks ahead of the sweeper. They’ll all stop and wait 20 minutes for the sweeper to catch up and refill water at the hydrant before continuing on.
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.
It’s not “legal” to park after the sweeper comes. It’s no parking for the full two hour window. I have seen them loop back after the sweeper passes to give more tickets.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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).
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.
One, yes, the separate charge of civil tax fraud is not tax evasion and is not a crime.
Two, the IRS is a civil agency. It can only bring civil actions, even against alleged crimes. The DOJ, on the other hand, takes criminal referrals. (We tend to see civil siblings to criminal counterparts across our body of law.)
Going back to OP’s question, when people refer to a high-crime neighbourhood, they aren’t talking about parking violations.
Yeah, that's my point. It's not a neutral point of view. Unlawfully operating cars is the most widespread and impactful behavior in SF, followed by wage theft, tax fraud, and tenant harassment. And all the other stuff that gets discussed as "crime" is in 4th place or lower.
> Unlawfully operating cars is the most widespread and impactful behavior in SF
If you think you can convince your fellow citizens to criminalise parking tickets, go for it. I doubt it has that much support. (But I don’t doubt that confidently!)
You're not afraid to admit what's marketed as a fine or deterrent is simply a weirdly targeted tax but you're annoyed that it's sometimes avoidable due to only sporadic assessment of it.
IDK what plane this policy spectrum exists on but man is horseshoe theory clearly alive and well on it.
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?
Different neighborhoods may want different types/amount of enforcement as well. Some neighborhoods may have tiny driveways and are happy that a lot of cars can get away with parking "illegally" due to non-enforcement and put up with the resulting narrow paths where one car has to pull aside to let another car past. Other neighborhoods might have almost no cars ever parked on the street and people get angry if anyone parks in front of "their" curb, even though it's a public street and anyone can "legally" park there.
This kind of difference in desire from area to area should be reflected in municipal codes and have clear signage. But sometimes these neighborhood norms are only reflected in de facto enforcement, not in de jure written legal code.
This has a parallel in the form of HOA's. Most of the justifications I hear for HOA's are that they prevent "$THING_1", "$THING_2", and "$THING_3" ... but all of those are already prohibited by municipal code and can be addressed by making a call to 311. However, citizens of many cities often don't have faith in police / code enforcement to respond with a proper ticket. Sometimes I wonder if all those HOA fees were going to the city if that would pay for diligent non-HOA enforcement.
Well, if you look at this data, virtually all of the tickets are for leaving your car in a street sweeping zone at the wrong time. So they are functioning as adjuncts of the street sweeping regime. Then you should think about this history of street sweeping in San Francisco. I think you might find that it is the opposite of your preconception. The wealthiest neighborhoods got rid of street sweeping decades ago, specifically because they didn't want to have to move their cars so much.
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.
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.
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?
(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)
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.
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
> 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.
Often it's unofficially the policy. For PT ticket fines in Melbourne, I've never heard of someone having a fine enforced for the first problem. It's pretty much always just a warning logged against you.
Where I'm from there's no concept of towing on any parking violations. No one has the right to touch your vehicle, and if the police is involved they'd just contact the owner. The police would only move a car if it's a danger to the public.
A tow truck is only something you'd call for assistance, not something you fear seeing.
(Parking fines suck, but the municipal ones are usually more reasonable here, even if they don't always get the rules right. It's the parking companies managing large private parking lots, often for free to the lot owner, that are absurd.)
I don't know of a country that requires all bicycle parking in any non-private location to be paid, nor a country that requires payment for roadside parking on country roads outside cities. Heck, even within cities, only the very dense ones seem to require paid parking on smaller roads.
Public space does not imply free of any use, but rather that it is freely used by all. The purpose of paid roadside parking is to reduce demand on what quickly becomes a limited resource in dense cities.
Here (Denmark), blocking a drive-way would not be a parking violation handled by a parking inspector, but a traffic violation handled by the police. They would contact you directly and have you sprint to your car.
Parking tickets are also considered fees, paid to those managing the parking area (municipality for public roads), as opposed to fines issued by the police or a judge and subject to very specific rules.
>> 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.
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.
I totally agree with you on that, but then why have this program at first place then?
I'm just saying that given its SFMTA -- if the tow truck will take say 30 min, they will probably try to wait and issue the ticket later right before tow truck can arrive so that they can get the fines. SFMTA relies heavily on fining people for their revenue and hence incentivized to not act on good faith here. Obviously, it an accusation based on anecdotes and personal experience and by no means an evidence, and I may very well be wrong, but overall I've very very little faith in SFMTA.
>> I imagine the text goes out from SF's servers simultaneously with the tow truck. These systems are often old. I wouldn't assume anything here.
Fines are big source of revenue for MTA. Citation would be $110 something, and if it gets towed its additional $700 for first X hours and then more later.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good point. I wonder if it might be a bimodal distribution - peaks for the super poor and the super wealthy. Of course, there are more poor than wealthy, so maybe you'd need to look at the rate per capita for different income brackets.
Maybe but honestly your logic doesn’t really make any sense to me anyway. If my time is worth $10k/hr, why am I driving myself? That alone is a huge waste of money.
My only knowledge of significant parking ticket acquisition from upper classes comes from lawyers outside courthouses. I tried looking for reporting on this but it may have just been a hyper local thing to where I grew up.
Could be family, I knew the daughter of a wealthy man who used to park wherever she liked and would pay the tickets without a second thought. I never asked her about it, but given what I remember of her (very personable and naive) she probably didn't see it as a problem, she just paid them and that was it.
Having the ticket price linked to their income would immediately make the game fair. If you earn 10k/h and you need to pay a 100k ticket you will be more careful.
He would park directly in front of our office building that was located inside a large complex that had a movie theater, fancy restaurants, and all kinda stuffs like that.
They couldnt tow so they would just write a ticket for being in the spot after like 60 minutes. He racked up thousands in tickets and simply just didnt pay them. Never got in trouble either lol. Since it was private property, I guess the owners just didnt care that much. He was a super douche and ended up quitting thankfully.
This is the insight behind demand-driven parking fees. The super wealthy folks who can pay an infinite amount for the spot won't matter how much the spot costs, they'll just pay the fee.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
I agree. And on top of that it would be great to have spots with ALPRs that delivery companies can pay for their use and discourage or tow non-compliant vehicles.
Covid time encouraged new food pickup priority parking spots but I don't see a lot of new thinking around emergent street use needs. We have massively increased delivery culture and micro mobility shares and city planning is lagging. (I think delivery is great - fewer car trips and just overall more efficient - my opinion).
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.
I can't speak for SF I'm in Seattle. I don't think it is incumbent on delivery drivers to do activism for their employers. That's my opinion. And I still don't understand why people don't see that the delivery driver on foot is a vulnerable user of the roads and sidewalks. We aren't perfect but we are there for the public not because we like it.
Someone else mentioned "externalizing" the cost of parking via citations. Those are expensive and a trove for the city. That sounds more like subsidising than externalizing.
As far as feeling sorry for "them" - that is a disconcerting view of a servant class.
UPS drivers don't need to write their congressperson. UPS the company can just get their lobbyists to pressure city officials to convert more street parking spaces to commercial only spaces.
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.
Ok. I understand bike lanes. I didn't say anything about more lanes, bro. I am talking about delivery vehicles and the challenges they face in urban environments. Keep in mind that a delivery driver can spend as much time on foot as they do in their vehicle. This means interacting with vehicles and bikes as a laden pedestrian. They are compromised and it can be dangerous.
Delivery vehicles reduce the number of cars on the road and therefore make it easier for bicycles to negotiate the roads. One delivery vehicle can easily replace dozens of car trips.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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]
Note that 21209 does not say "otherwise permitted" but "permitted." One interpratation (perhaps what the DMV is using) is that, since curb parking is generally permitted, parking in a bike lane that abuts the curb would also be generally permitted.
The city I live in put up "no parking in bike lane" signs everywhere, presumably to address this ambiguity.
FWIW the DMV test question was bad in other ways; it was a multiple choice asking "Which of these is not an illegal place to park:" with the correct answer being "in a bike lane." My daughter got it wrong not just because of not knowing the answer, but also because the double-negative confused her.
What was the double negative? You haven't included one in your telling of the question ("Which of these is not an illegal place to park:" with the correct answer being "in a bike lane." - that's just a single negative...)
Ah, I hadn't thought of illegal as counting for a double negative - it's not one for how I think, but I totally see both why you said it and why it would be a double negative for some people! Thanks for explaining
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.
Yeah, they ignore SF311 reports by policy. I've managed it by flagging down an amazingly helpful parking control officer that happened to be in the area, or else by calling and reporting an obstruction of traffic (not mentioning the bike lane) and then waiting until the PCO arrived and talking to them.
The officers have almost always been helpful, but I think they generally tend towards lower confrontation and more "efficient" violations like street sweeping or expired meters by default (or perhaps directed by management).
This was years ago when I was younger and had more free time. I called SFMTA traffic directly (you learn the menu tree quickly). It varied but I want to say it usually took between 20 minutes to over an hour, including multiple callbacks to check on status and ensure they knew I was serious
Thank you for sharing that. It clears up my confusion. I thought perhaps you had found some magic way to get them to do something without you needing to disrupt your day.
It doesn't seem worth the time investment, as it won't have any effect beyond the particular incident you're reporting. It won't increase the threat of enforcement such that people decide not to break the law.
It is for light rail/trolleys (not buses) and only when you're on a two-way road and there's room to pass on the right. It also applies when they're moving, not just when they're stopped.
Basically, if a trolley/light rail has tracks in one of the left lanes of a two-way road, you must pass on the right unless directed otherwise by a traffic cop.
The reason is that these vehicles obstruct vision and you're not allowed to overtake and pass on the left when you can't see oncoming traffic or when approaching an intersection/grade/curve/oncoming traffic or your view of a bridge/viaduct/tunnel within 100 feet is obstructed.
I don't think needing to pass on the right is a defense against driving on the sidewalk. I think it just implies that you cannot pass while they are picking up passengers.
Yeah I think the intention is to prevent someone who disembarked from the bus and are then crossing the street from getting mowed down by a car overtaking from the bus's left. It's similar to why you can't pass a school bus when it has its stop sign out.
It was clearly a typo in the book. There’s even a diagram showing that people are loading from the right, and a sentence saying you pass on that side while passengers are loading.
If they meant “don’t pass while it is stopped”, they would have said that instead of writing the equivalent of “you can pass when [false]”
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.
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.
Of course, but bad rules enforced imperfectly and good rules enforced perfectly are both categorically and morally superior to bad rules enforced perfectly because some extremist has fantasies of everyone goose stepping in perfect line.
That doesn't change the fact that the laws/rules/etc across all sorts of issues are all written half baked with the assumption that enforcers will be reasonable and all sorts of edge cases don't need to be supported.
The reason illegally parked vehicles are illegal is not because they are illegal, that's circular and the peddlers of that sort of logic should be derided if not marginalized. We care about illegally parked vehicles, littering, and all manner of public nuisances because of the downside to the public of said nuisance. Absent the downside there is no reason to care. And if you automate perfect enforcement you will be inundated with tickets for situations that lack downsides that the enforcers were mostly ignoring.
> think you’ll find this leads to infinite fine revenue and higher congestion in pretty much all cities
How? Laffer curve will max out as behaviour adjusts. And that adjustment means folks parking legally or forgoing a car or the area in question, not driving around in circles for fun.
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?
I'm being downvoted by being anything less then apologetically polite while expressing a viewpoint that isn't pro whatever the lowest common denominator wants.
That's just how comment sections that keep "rightthink score" are.
I couldn't downvote your direct reply to me, but if I could have I would have because you're being an ass. Calling me "perverted" because I don't think people should block bike lanes says way more about you than me.
Not wanting the bike lanes blocked is fine. The problem is that you want, as a means to this end, 100% enforcement of laws that were never written nor were their punishments apportioned with the expectation of such with zero regard for the consequences. That is a bad thing to be advocating for over such a mundane issue and I think it's belies a lack of moral character you often see in this subject of discussion (though you do see it in others and it's bad there too) wherein people want their preferred class of traffic prioritized using state force to the determent of all the others.
On the contrary, it is not a mundane issue. Traffic infractions and parking violations such as blocking bike lanes or crosswalks directly contribute to a less safe environment for everyone on the street. Traffic fatality is the third leading cause of preventable death in the United States. It is the cavalier attitudes of people who think they should be able to whatever they want, whenever they want with their cars that belies a lack of moral character.
There is no social contract in scored internet comment sections. The herd will do what makes the number go up. If a large number of people showed up and upvoted every racist comment to the moon the verbiage in here would pivot almost overnight. Mobs don't have self awareness or free will.
I think you can't directly acknowledge the guidelines because you know you are willfully violating them.
The guidelines are the rules of the road for the community. The moral obligation to follow the guidelines is not conditional on whether you think the community is a mob. Even if you thought you have no obligation to the community, your behavior is still disrespectful to the intentions of the moderators.
The way you write makes it seem like you hold both the community and the guidelines in contempt. What is the purpose for you in participating in this community? Would it not be better for you and the community both if you stop posting like this?
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.
Yes, things like street closures for construction, film shoots, or Neighborhood Night Outs would all need permits to obstruct traffic/close the street.
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.
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!
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 ;)
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.
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.
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”
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.
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?
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.
Market rate is $4.10 per hour during peak hours. But it falls off precipitously per hour and ceases to be enforced around 6pm. For overstays those little white golf cart trucks have cameras that check license plates for permits. I recently got a parking permit for $200 or so after paying like $500 in tickets for various infractions including “Parking on Grades, wheels straight”. So I very much want anyone overstaying a 2hr parking spot to get tickets and or towed to make room. And I can speak from experience having just recently being towed, that the parking downtown is ruthlessly enforced. It will cost you about $700 if you’re towed.
I've always wondered what the market rate for parking would be if you allowed for things other than parking like restaurant tables, a shed, a tiny skyscraper...
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.
That's more or less how Tokyo works. Almost no on-street parking, people have to prove that they have a parking spot when buying a car, liberal zoning so there are lots of very small pay parking lots around the city. It works really well IMO but it would be politically very difficult in North America.
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.
Opposition must come through legal means, because the cheapness and omnipresence of enforcement is only getting better, especially for SFPD on the tech front.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for clarifying! So basically his van kept getting towed and he kept losing business as a result? Presumably it also cost him to recover his vehicle. So in summary, if you got on this list you're just permanently screwed in SF? And you can get on this list by paying a fine twice by accident?
> "?towid=1"
Funnily, incrementing that number in the country I live in would itself be a crime. If the company I did this to found out, they could probably take me to court and win.
More likely is he paid a ticket incorrectly. Someone said he paid the same ticket twice instead of paying each ticket once. Then the city racked up delinquency fines while making little to no effort to inform him of these fines or the outstanding ticket. One day, he gets towed and can't get his van back until thousands of dollars in fines and penalties are paid from a ticket that he thought had been taken care of long 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.
Just to confirm, this is what happened - he paid one twice, and therefore the other became delinquent. However, if you file a FOIA request with the SFMTA and do some basic analysis on how much is "owed per license plate", you will see that certain license plates have been allowed to accrue tens of thousands of dollars in parking fines with virtually no towing repercussions, going back as far as data is available (2013). Around 80-90% of these vehicles are rental cars, around 5-8% of them are commercial trucking companies which absorb the cost of 2 tickets per day, and this tiny 1% of license plates are effectively "lawless parkers" who drive high-end cars and accrue tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid parking fines every year.
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.
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
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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?
But the post saying it's a better method isn't suggesting extra labor to do modifications. That's useful just as pure knowledge, and also it can be applied into future designs or when parts of the road wear out.
A car could push into the first third of it, but visibility would be fine in that case. Trying to use the whole thing in a car would mean you're jutting into the traffic lane, and anyone willing to do that is causing bigger problems. And if a bike parks in the stripes that's fine for visibility too.
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.
It makes sense. It was ridiculous that they were originally proposing ticketing people without there being signage that it was illegal to park there. They need to just paint the curbs.
Is it ridiculous to ticket someone who parks in the middle of Market St if there's no sign that it's illegal?
No. Driving a car is a privilege, and a dangerous one at that, which requires a competency test. It is not unreasonable to expect licensed drivers to know the statewide laws that govern that privilege without reminder signs.
In some ways, yes, though not in many cities like SF, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, etc.
But it's also a chicken and egg problem: often transit is not viable or is too slow precisely because everything is devoted to cars. The SF Van Ness BRT is an excellent example - I used to routinely get off the 49 bus and walk faster than it stuck in car traffic, but after the BRT the bus is a much better and faster experience than driving could ever be.
One of the most common reasons for watering down or canceling pedestrian, transit, and biking infra projects is a refusal to negatively impact driving in any way, even if the net societal benefit (especially to lower income households who take transit at much higher rates) is far greater.
Good governance requires sometimes unpopular choices (see Paris's recent bicycle transformation, or SF's recent recall election over the creation of a new public park in place of a redundant street)
> The SF Van Ness BRT is an excellent example - I used to routinely get off the 49 bus and walk faster than it stuck in car traffic
It's funny that you use that particular example considering the SF Supervisors of 1958 are the ones who created that problem by refusing to build the elevated freeway that transit planning engineers correctly envisioned we would need. Tearing down the stub end of it also created the most dangerous intersection in the city at Market & Octavia. As a pedestrian it would be so nice to have cars elevated up off the ground instead of having to wait to cross on foot. A lot of intersections of Octavia and its cross streets don't even allow pedestrian crossing at all lmfao
Imagine you and your spouse both work full time, and you have 1-2 children. And your definition of 'living well' includes having those children learn to swim well, and do some sort of after-school sport, and also do math supplementation because SFUSD teaches math at a really slow pace.
I don't believe any of the above are outlier or unreasonable positions to have.
Yet a family in that situation would severely struggle to fit everything in if they had to rely solely on public transport to get between home, school and after-school activities.
(I grew up in London, where public transport is often faster than driving. In San Francisco, most of my car journeys would take 3-4 times as long by public transport.)
Admittedly, public transport is garbage. And for the time we'd go to La Petite Baleen, a car is 0.5x the time. So in that respect I agree. In Mission Bay everything else is close by.
But I think perhaps if someone told me "We don't live well. I can only take my child to swim class on the weekends" I would think that somewhat strange.
Re: La Petite Baleen: 34 mins vs 1 hour 11 mins for me.
My son's swim school is 20 mins away by car, or 60 mins by public transport.
I take your point that these are first world problems.
But my point is that not having access to a car in San Francisco is a significant inconvenience and it's incorrect to say 'you can live well' without that access. You might not be so inconvenienced that you would say "we don't live well", but there's a 'meh' zone in between the two.
Normally I'd agree with you, but I can pick my swim lesson time and I don't have to worry about headway timing because I know when to leave and the train is timed. For untimed services, certainly I'd believe it.
These are complaints of generality that don't have relevance in the specific case.
There are also international tourists who may have different local parking rules than the ones in SF. Having clear demarcations between allowed and non allowed parking areas makes it easier for everyone to follow the correct rules.
Do you have an rss feed of road rules piped into Anki cards or what?
Or just maybe "driver's license is a privilege that requires you to study and know the rules of the road" is a fallacious claim that rests on pedantic legal formalism and an impoverished sense of human psychology.
No, I don't; there are plenty of places you can't legally park that do not have painted curbs or "No Parking" signage. Do we also need curbs and signage near every fire hydrant? How about every driveway? Can drivers double-park anywhere they want? Should they yield to pedestrians in crosswalks? Etc. etc.
Reviewing the thread, the context is newly enforcing something that might not be illegal in all jurisdictions. Citing different contexts where signage is not always used doesn't change the fact that the discussion focuses on change in common practice in a specific context. In fact, I observe plenty of signage for fire hydrants and driveways in places where people commonly make parking errors.
The question still stands. How do you ensure you detect changes rules of the road in order to maintain your privilege?
>>>>>>> Where I live, many people park at intersections right up to the curb
>>>>>> This is now illegal in some states
>>>>> 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.
>>>> It was ridiculous that they were originally proposing ticketing people without there being signage that it was illegal to park there.
>>> Why? Having a driver's license is a privilege that requires you to study and know the rules of the road.
>> Do you have an rss feed of road rules piped into Anki cards or what?
> No, I don't; there are plenty of places you can't legally park that do not have painted curbs or "No Parking" signage.
It isn't bizarre that rules and practice vary widely in different cultural contexts. Even your claim is caveated as "most of EU," recognizing that it might not be the same in all places.
In many places in the US, there is a culture of legibility, whereby informational affordances are relevantly and generously provisioned. This allows for more certainty for both facility users and rule enforcers. On the flip side, there are a lot of signs all over the place.
You could argue that people cannot be expected to carry tape measures with them, because their glove compartments are too small.
But the difficulty of judging the distance from the intersection is a factor in a minority of cases.
SFMTA could have chosen to enforce the law but allow a tolerance of 5 feet. That would start providing safety benefits earlier without surprising any driver who made an honest mistake in their estimate of the distance.
Portland does the same thing since most blocks in the older parts of town are 200 feet. Reserving 20 feet at either end would take away a huge chunk of street parking in residential areas built before driveways were common.
It's also why our light rail trains can only be two cars long.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
$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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
(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.
Believe it or not, parking reformists tend to agree! The fact we even have a parking "fine" indicates that it isn't really priced right; if you park somewhere you should just pay the market rate for doing so, whether it's for 30 minutes or 30 days.
The legendary Donald Shoup (who sadly died this year) https://www.shoupdogg.com/ - writes about this in The High Cost of Free Parking
> (b) Parking signs are too goddamn hard to parse, that's the real problem.
Product idea: a smartphone app that uses your GPS location to tell you how many tickets have been given at a specific location, how recently, and the day/time distribution.
Then pair that with an AI model that's trained on the signage to be able to parse what it says, and I bet you could very accurately predict whether a given spot is at risk of getting you a ticket.
Every time I drive in SF, I pay for parking, and then get a parking ticket.
Apparently I'm supposed to know that a red parking meter is for trucks. The "trucks-only sign", if there was even supposed to be one, wasn't attached to that meter or the parking sign.
The other time I was the first to arrive on a block, and paid the wrong meter out of confusion.
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.
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.
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.
"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...
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.
Isn't 11 the smallest divisor that gives those guarantees?
It's what quite a few banks used to use as a check digit, maybe that where you remember it from. But it depends on the size of the number you want to verify and exactly what system is employed. Lots of banks used 9 or 10 digit numbers which worked with a "11 check". Nine was also often used on smaller numbers.
You can use any prime afaik for this example but your number space will be limited.
For 2 digit checks it's often mod 97 (largest prime < 100) because it can detect all single-digit errors and most adjacent digit transpositions.
Used in IBAN bank account numbers, EU VAT numbers (UK, FR, BE), etc
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).
But why?
Because it means that 85.7% of all mistakes will be caught by very simple software checks before getting to your system. (85.7% == 6/7).
Check digits in your userdata is an old trick and is very useful in practice. Maybe modern systems should aim for something better than %7 but it's a good starting point as a system design concept.
Just a mistake, I imagine. Probably just typed the pattern out starting with the last number they wrote, which unfortunately was invalid.
> I was looking at ticket 984,946,605. When I type in 1 higher, 984,946,606, no ticket is found. ... So the ticket after 984,946,606 is actually 984,946,610
Nice observation!
Oh wow this is from the same author as https://walzr.com/bop-spotter -- love these projects
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?
dop-spotter is next
Hold for wap-spotter
That's easy, it'll mostly highlight North Beach[1]
1. https://italysegreta.com/dop-ingredients-of-neapolitan-pizza...
Oh I remember this website nice to be reminded of this!
Good Lord this is cool, gorgeous Nokia UI
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.
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.
They are separate dystopian that have public video and audio feed of SF on front page 4K
Shotspotter not related co.
In interested in the hardware part. A microphone constantly listening. Not for the microphone, but for the IP protection, batteries etc
Edit: apparently it’s not running its own hardware. It’s piggybacking on some business called Orchestra?
It's a parody of a business. https://orchestraos.com/privacy
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.
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.
> 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.
> They work under the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), not the SFPD.
The other points are valid, but note that California’s main general purpose state police force (CHP, which also absorbed the named-as-such State Police in 1995) is part of the State Transportation Agency, so being organizationally subordinated to a transportation agency is not really evidence of not being “police” in the normal sense.
> tracking USPS employees
... that actually also sounds useful
i don't see why they shouldnt be tracked while working
Tracking the location of the truck delivering your package sounds pretty useful. And UPS/Amazon already do this. But publishing the individual personal location of each of the 500,000 USPS employees in real-time while they're working... is a bit different.
If you track them while working you’ll focus on hourly productivity rather than annual productivity and customer satisfaction. My postman has literal love letters by children written on houses on the block, makes sure you never loose any important documents, and so generally amazing, and I’m sure if you looked at his « number of houses per hour » metric it’d look bad.
If we're talking about public tracking: package theft
Uhhh... Seems like the problem to address is crime? It's kinda crazy what kind of third world shit people just accept as normal now
I find it hilarious that people are arguing against a person w/ your using w/ the word being contrarian w/ you being contrarian right now ahahaha.
People it seems have stopped wanting for fix or reform the system.
Ok, person with anonymous account name.
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.
They are operating in public. They shouldn't have expectations of privacy.
Are you against ICE agent tracking apps as well?
There's a difference between being in public and being tracked.
Of course they don't have expectations of privacy in terms of people being able to e.g. take photos or videos of them. The same way people can take photos of you or me.
But broadcasting someone's real-time location to the whole world all day long, in real time, is something else entirely. That has never been considered part of being in public. That's targeted surveillance, which is very, very different.
It should be noted that SFMTA, the alleged victim of this website, uses a network of 400+ Flock ALPR cameras to track the movement of every vehicle in the region. They're able to do this not because of some special agency authority, but because it's legal for anyone to surveil public areas.
Well, maybe they shouldn't either?
How is that relevant? Do they publish the exact location of every vehicle in real time?
They keep that data for themselves, they don’t even tell you how much data they have on you.
Why is it unfair that they also be tracked?
It might be fair, but is it a good idea? What you are doing is justifying something you wouldn't agree with because it targets people belonging to an organization doing the thing you don't agree with. That is can be problematic because
1. They now can say 'well it is done to us why can't we do it to others' instead of engaging with real arguments about using ALPR flock cameras to track people
2. You assume that a person working for an organization is automatically complicit in the decisions of that organization and is therefore fair to be targeted by systems you don't want targeted at yourself -- this is fine when in war or other struggles deemed worthy of placing aside normal human morality temporarily, but is this one of those?
3. This type of thing can turn into a race to the bottom where each side escalates compromises of their basic value systems
The police as an organization do not care about engaging with you in good faith and are far past a race to the bottom regarding surveillance.
> Of course they don't have expectations of privacy in terms of people being able to e.g. take photos or videos of them. The same way people can take photos of you or me.
Might be a culture difference with europe but I find it rude if someone would take a picture of me without asking. I can think of few purposes (stalking, facial recognition training or tracking, sharing in a chat group to make fun of) that you can do with a picture of a random person on the street that you'd not get permission for when you're required to ask
It's always a balance: if someone wants to do it for legal reasons (I just stole their purse and am running away) that's very different. There's almost no law that works absolutely anyway, there can very often be overriding reasons that are already defined in the law (or another law) or that a judge will accept. Just talking about the default case
Of course it's rude. But we don't criminalize behavior that is merely rude. It's rude to swear at someone or fart in their direction too.
In public, US courts have established you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Because you're in public. Someone can take photos or videos of you, whether you're in the background or whether they're zooming in on your face.
Obviously if you're getting right up in their face and refusing to go away, that turns into harassment and you can call the cops. But it doesn't matter if you're using a camera or not.
How do you think these public officials with massive paychecks and life long massive pensions operate; they drive around in the most noticeable little vehicles that you can spot from a mile away. If you needed to track them for some reason you would just follow them, and most likely people in the neighborhood probably already know their routes anyways.
It seems you are fixated on something you just can’t let go, as if these are some kind of undercover agents selling kidnapped and trafficked young children and he’s blowing their cover … they’re writing traffic tickets off $480 dollars … the least we spoiled be able to do is track the public official while they’re writing excessive fines.
Massive paycheck? Feel free to apply yourself https://careers.sf.gov/classifications/?classCode=8214
I dont know how far 70-100k goes in SF, but accoriding to https://www.livingwage-sf.org/living-wage-calculator/ it is barely enough for a single adult, but you better not have a child!
What the cost of living inside SF is, is irrelevant to the matter. As city employees they also have other benefits related to commuting and no one makes them commute into the city for that job that pays at minimum $70k and up to $100k in a country where the average wage is $39k...the average...and it is for *checks notes* driving around, looking, and pushing buttons all day.
You seem to lack perspective, probably because as most here, we all likely make well above what the average person makes around us. It can be forgiven as ignorance, but it's the same thing as the people around me who are worth 9+ figures who flatter their multiple staff with all kinds of pleasantries and benefits while paying them 6 figure salaries out of an odd poorly understood "guilt" or something that is prevalent among those who are better off than others.
I get your point, but reality is that under no objective perspective is $100k a bad income for what they do, especially since those "officers" pull in $90 million per year in citations.
But to answer your question, no, you will not be living in Sea Cliff on even $100k, but seriously, let's put into perspective what someone who drives around, looks, and then pushes buttons to print out a paper should be making. How many other people could be doing that job. I guarantee that it's not even a competitive position that hires in the best interest of the public.
You seem to be the one lacking not just perspective but correct facts.
> for that job that pays at minimum $70k and up to $100k in a country where the average wage is $39k...the average...
Where are you getting an average of $39k from? The OECD lists 2024 US average salary as $82,933 [1].
So this is a job that pays from less than average to a bit more than average nationally.
But, the mean hourly wage in San Francisco is $48.15 [2], which is slightly over $100K annually. Which makes it a job that pays from well below average to average at best.
> and it is for *checks notes* driving around, looking, and pushing buttons all day.
You clearly have no concept of the kinds of dangerous physical encounters cops have with scary, crazy, threatening, lunatic people on a regular basis.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...
[2] https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/occupationalem...
> You clearly have no concept of the kinds of dangerous physical encounters cops have with scary, crazy, threatening, lunatic people on a regular basis.
Parking enforcement people are not police officers, nor do they have any of the powers of one.
If you park your car on a bus stop, you deserve that fine. I wish my city fine like this.
And if you park blocking bike lane?
If you don't think this tool poses any risk to these people let's try walk through a scenario.
Let's say someone sees a parking warden they find physically attractive. They follow them for a bit and when they write up their next ticket, the stalker pulls up this app to get the officer's ID. The next day they pull up the app to see where the warden is working that day - they drive over there, and it takes them maybe half an hour to find the warden based on the lag between last-ticket-location and real-time-location. They strike up a creepy conversation and the parking warden eventually leaves, disturbed. The next day, the parking warden is working a night shift - they've been told to patrol a dark neighborhood where there are plenty of alleyways that nobody can see into...
See where I'm going with this?
Anything which allows someone to get ongoing location data for a person who they've just come across on the street is inherently a danger to the surveilled person.
That's the example you run toward?
More likely someone gets a ticket that's bullshit, winds up paying, and this happens enough that they have their buddy wait for the person and throw a brick at them or something.
This is a wild hypothetical that tries to blame a tool for the problem of a user. Won’t anyone think of the children?
Let’s modify your post to highlight the absurdity:
Let's say someone sees a parking warden they find physically attractive. They follow them for a bit in their car and when they write up their last ticket, the stalker gets in their car and follows the officer back to the station and then to their home. The next day they pull up to the warden’s house and follow them to see where the warden is working that day - they drive over there. They strike up a creepy conversation and the parking warden eventually leaves, disturbed. The next day, the parking warden is working a night shift - they've been told to patrol a dark neighborhood where there are plenty of alleyways that nobody can see into...
See where I'm going with this?
Anything which allows someone to follow a person in a vehicle who they've just come across on the street is inherently a danger to the surveilled person.
For anyone else looking for which of these 200 words are actually different, this second post follows the person home instead of using the tracking website method
There's a gigantic difference in the ability of the surveilled person to protect themselves in the scenario you sketch versus the one that I sketch. In your scenario the surveilled person has a chance of noticing the fact that somebody is physically following them. And when they have eyes on the stalker, they can call the police to come and address the situation when they predict the stalker might escalate.
In the scenario that I sketch, the stalker runs zero risk while obtaining the information. Hell, they don't even have to log in to this tool, so there's zero record of who accessed location information for which parking warden.
And yes, it is absolutely incumbent upon the creators of tools to take into account how they might be misused. To pretend that all humans are of right mind and incapable of doing harm and only design for the case of ethical use is laughably naive.
What a strange line to draw when in both hypothetical scenarios the stalker actively engages in a creepy conversation with the target before “you see where I’m going with this?” happens.
Tracking enforcement officials decreases their ability to enforce and makes them easier to target.
ICE agents shouldn't be doing their enforcement. Deserve to be targeted, and given there is very little transparency to their actions, anything to check their actions is an improvement.
SF parking cops are not evil, operate transparently, and limiting their capability to enforce is not important to keep rule of law applicable.
Public officer tracking apps can be okay, but only if you deem those public officers to be severely lacking in public oversight, and massively overreaching in their enforcement.
>Tracking enforcement officials decreases their ability to enforce and makes them easier to target.
Why is that a bad thing? God forbid the enforcers only have the effective power to enforce where there is sufficient local support that they feel safe doing so. Sounds like a pretty effective check on power to me.
There was a case in my city a few years ago where the state police pulled someone over, found the passenger had weed on his person was in the process of arresting him but had to abort and he fled on foot because they initiated the stop in a supermarket parking lot at a busy time and the passers by were numerous and displeased enough the officers felt unsafe.
I get that people get their panties in a knot over the idea that the government might have less practical ability to enforce petty civil nuisance stuff like parking but the flip side of this is that when you need serious resource investment to do things people don't like (like arresting weed dealers, ICE raids, etc), you do a lot less of it. And that's a tradeoff that I think is very worth making.
I mean it's only fair, I would prefer that both ordinary people and public officials were granted privacy in public spaces, but we don't so they don't.
Citizens can't hold public officials accountable when they're only accountable to other public officials.
So take this to the maximum, lets say in 30 years (honestly probably a lot sooner) - should police have trackers on them that give YOU accurate up to the second 3d/GPS location of all of them and done in an app that's attached to a drone that shoots people. Since they are in public this is the obvious thing you're looking for.
Keep in mind the site doesn’t track officers in real time, it reports the last location and timestamp of a ticket.
Realtime police officer location data would interfere with arrests and investigation, but realtime reporting of incidents is critical public data that shouldn’t be fear mongered away.
If officers giving tickets are in fear of their life, taking down a tracking website isn’t the change that keeps them safe...
I'm trying to show how people on here are saying because someone is in the public we are owed exact xyz location data of said person is fucking ridiculous.
It should be the city's responsibility to add a hysteresis to the reported data; perhaps this was already there.
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.
I have some sympathies for your argument, but I suspect you are trying to prove too much: your argument could more or less justify an infinitely large fee for parking violations (or even imprisonment). Most people seem happier with small, finite amounts for these things?
As a second point, I don't think parking and public goods have anything in common. Parking is _not_ a public good, and shouldn't be treated as such. Parking spaces are rivalrous and excludable. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good for the background.) They should be provided by the private market just as any other good and service, instead of being heavily regulated and partially being provided free-to-the-user at the cost of tax payers and business owners.
How did you go from an argument for enforcing parking laws to infinite fees and imprisonment? Where is there such a parking law?
> 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.
While personal privacy may be preserved outside the scope of public acts, an individual who, in the execution of official duties, operates vehicles displaying lights or sirens and wears official identification inherently waives any claim to geospatial privacy.
I dunno, I don't think we should publish the real-time location of guards protecting sensitive government locations.
Oh, there's no need. They leak that themselves!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
https://apnews.com/article/biden-trump-macron-bodyguards-sec...
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.
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?
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.
Thats a silly observation. Reasonable privacy is a reasonable expectation for anyone in the US.
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!)
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.
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.
Initial thought: That doesn’t sound great.
Thank you!
Loudly publishing the information at least got the city to stop quietly publishing the information.
You're not wrong. But serving it up on a silver platter in a pretty UI that got a lot of press was probably not necessary to make that happen.
We'd probably care if they weren't tracking us whenever they get a chance.
You think the SF parking enforcement agency is tracking everyone?! That's one of the wilder conspiracy theories I've heard recently.
Tut tut. What's the threat model?
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.)
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).
> 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.
I’m playing the world’s smallest violin for those poor parking enforcement officers
Parking enforcement is unequivocally good and these people are not regular cops
Love the leaderboard feature. Relevant fee breakdown: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
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?
> '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.
> 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.
Gleefully?
because they should express remorse and handle your car with care vs you know, putting out that fire?
Brother in law is a firefighter, gleefully is exactly the correct term here. According to him getting to bust windows to run the hose is literally their favorite thing to do. To the point where even if they don't actually need to, or it would be slower, they'll still do it. It's apparently a matter of principle.
I think apsurd interpreted Lammy’s post as a complaint, like the firefighters are too gleeful.
Then apsurd is pointing out that there’s no reason to complain, and they shouldn’t waste time with remorse.
I don’t think Lammy actually meant it as a complaint, though, which ended up making apsurd’s correction confusing.
Anyway, I think everyone in the thread agreed: park in front of the fire hydrant and nobody feels bad but you as you get your window smashed. Broad anti-fire consensus.
Yes exactly. Funny to read the discussion all on account of a single word.
this is why I come to HN
Correct; not a complaint :)
My dad, former firefighter, age 83, likes to tell this story of someone parked in front of a hydrant and them running the hose through the car. He’ll be happy it’s stood the test of time.
If my bike were capable of messing up a car I 100% would ram every jerk parked in a bike lane.
So I can see where your BIL is coming from.
Oh if you haven't seen it you're gonna love this.
https://youtu.be/bzE-IMaegzQ?feature=shared
Gotta practice your jumps and hop up on top of it. It's in the lane, but you can be too...
As not a fire fighter, I agree!
I suppose I took OP to say gleefully as if it was uncalled for. But maybe it's what you said and they're just on the inside. Good to know all around.
It's San Francisco, parking legally generally requires replacing at least one window.
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.
And I think if the situation is a real problem they can tow it out of the way
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
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.
Looks like it's back up! https://x.com/rtwlz/status/1970722519918498102
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.
As someone from Europe I was a bit confused why SF parking cops seemed to only work throughout the night.
Ah, I’m in Central, I just assume the data feed was delayed by 2 hours for reason.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
Pretty sure it varies depending on where you live. iirc When I was in SF the tickets would get distributed ahead of time and the sweeper would follow within an hour or so. Once the sweeper went by you were free to re-park.
In Oakland, there are different vehicles that come by for different purposes. As I understand it there’s an agitator, sprayer, and sweeper. You have to know when the whole process is complete, so I understand it’s easier just to avoid for the whole window.
They’ve started looping back after the sweeper passes and enforcing the full two hour window.
Since when? Where did you get this information from?
The parking enforcement happens before the street sweeper comes. There’s usually four or five of them and they’re several blocks ahead of the sweeper. They’ll all stop and wait 20 minutes for the sweeper to catch up and refill water at the hydrant before continuing on.
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.
It’s not “legal” to park after the sweeper comes. It’s no parking for the full two hour window. I have seen them loop back after the sweeper passes to give more tickets.
According to https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/drive-park/how-avoid-pa...
> During street sweeping hours, you may not park until the street has been physically swept.
Officer 0438 appears to have begun his shift in Guadalajara
https://imgur.com/a/u4hg8DS
Oh my god. A $107 ticket for an EXPIRED METER?!
That's insanity. Turns out more than just thieves are thieves in SF.
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.
It's quite common for Bay Area workers to have a "supercommute"
Don’t give ICE any ideas!
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.
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.
It's down.
It’s up again.
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?
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...
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.
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...
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)
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.
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.
Traffic tickets are typically civil, not criminal.
[flagged]
> So is tax evasion
No.
“In the United States, tax evasion constitutes a crime” [1].
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tax_evasion
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6663
Moreover: https://www.irs.gov/irm/part25/irm_25-001-006
One, yes, the separate charge of civil tax fraud is not tax evasion and is not a crime.
Two, the IRS is a civil agency. It can only bring civil actions, even against alleged crimes. The DOJ, on the other hand, takes criminal referrals. (We tend to see civil siblings to criminal counterparts across our body of law.)
Going back to OP’s question, when people refer to a high-crime neighbourhood, they aren’t talking about parking violations.
Yeah, that's my point. It's not a neutral point of view. Unlawfully operating cars is the most widespread and impactful behavior in SF, followed by wage theft, tax fraud, and tenant harassment. And all the other stuff that gets discussed as "crime" is in 4th place or lower.
> Unlawfully operating cars is the most widespread and impactful behavior in SF
If you think you can convince your fellow citizens to criminalise parking tickets, go for it. I doubt it has that much support. (But I don’t doubt that confidently!)
Why is it most impactful?
You're not afraid to admit what's marketed as a fine or deterrent is simply a weirdly targeted tax but you're annoyed that it's sometimes avoidable due to only sporadic assessment of it.
IDK what plane this policy spectrum exists on but man is horseshoe theory clearly alive and well on it.
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?
Different neighborhoods may want different types/amount of enforcement as well. Some neighborhoods may have tiny driveways and are happy that a lot of cars can get away with parking "illegally" due to non-enforcement and put up with the resulting narrow paths where one car has to pull aside to let another car past. Other neighborhoods might have almost no cars ever parked on the street and people get angry if anyone parks in front of "their" curb, even though it's a public street and anyone can "legally" park there.
This kind of difference in desire from area to area should be reflected in municipal codes and have clear signage. But sometimes these neighborhood norms are only reflected in de facto enforcement, not in de jure written legal code.
This has a parallel in the form of HOA's. Most of the justifications I hear for HOA's are that they prevent "$THING_1", "$THING_2", and "$THING_3" ... but all of those are already prohibited by municipal code and can be addressed by making a call to 311. However, citizens of many cities often don't have faith in police / code enforcement to respond with a proper ticket. Sometimes I wonder if all those HOA fees were going to the city if that would pay for diligent non-HOA enforcement.
Well, if you look at this data, virtually all of the tickets are for leaving your car in a street sweeping zone at the wrong time. So they are functioning as adjuncts of the street sweeping regime. Then you should think about this history of street sweeping in San Francisco. I think you might find that it is the opposite of your preconception. The wealthiest neighborhoods got rid of street sweeping decades ago, specifically because they didn't want to have to move their cars so much.
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.
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.
Top comment might be inaccurate now - it seems that the site is showing recent data again (as recent as 24 minutes ago).
+1 working again
Wow, great work. This is the kind of citizen hackery we need in society :)
Why do you think that a tool to help people break the rules is somehow good for society?
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?
That's a list of bad reasons. Could we get a list of good reasons?
> posts on Hacker News
> is offended by non-conformity
Why do you think breaking rules is automatically bad for society?
Are you a child?
Are you? Because rules are not automatically good. The Nazis had lots of rules too.
+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
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)
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.
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
> 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.
It would have saved me $600 two weeks ago.
This is fantastic. It really signals that the point is not to get money from you, but to free up the parking spot.
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
Often it's unofficially the policy. For PT ticket fines in Melbourne, I've never heard of someone having a fine enforced for the first problem. It's pretty much always just a warning logged against you.
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?
They also ticket without towing, where the point is entirely to get money from you.
Or to say "don't do this"
Where I'm from there's no concept of towing on any parking violations. No one has the right to touch your vehicle, and if the police is involved they'd just contact the owner. The police would only move a car if it's a danger to the public.
A tow truck is only something you'd call for assistance, not something you fear seeing.
(Parking fines suck, but the municipal ones are usually more reasonable here, even if they don't always get the rules right. It's the parking companies managing large private parking lots, often for free to the lot owner, that are absurd.)
Where I'm from there's no concept of using public space to store your personal belongings without paying for it.
Care to elaborate, as that sounds rather extreme?
I don't know of a country that requires all bicycle parking in any non-private location to be paid, nor a country that requires payment for roadside parking on country roads outside cities. Heck, even within cities, only the very dense ones seem to require paid parking on smaller roads.
Public space does not imply free of any use, but rather that it is freely used by all. The purpose of paid roadside parking is to reduce demand on what quickly becomes a limited resource in dense cities.
What about e-scooters?
Towing makes perfect sense when a car is blocking access. Parked in front of driveways for example.
Here (Denmark), blocking a drive-way would not be a parking violation handled by a parking inspector, but a traffic violation handled by the police. They would contact you directly and have you sprint to your car.
Parking tickets are also considered fees, paid to those managing the parking area (municipality for public roads), as opposed to fines issued by the police or a judge and subject to very specific rules.
I've seen news stories about cops impounding nearby Teslas if they think its cameras might have caught something related.
>> 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.
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.
I totally agree with you on that, but then why have this program at first place then?
I'm just saying that given its SFMTA -- if the tow truck will take say 30 min, they will probably try to wait and issue the ticket later right before tow truck can arrive so that they can get the fines. SFMTA relies heavily on fining people for their revenue and hence incentivized to not act on good faith here. Obviously, it an accusation based on anecdotes and personal experience and by no means an evidence, and I may very well be wrong, but overall I've very very little faith in SFMTA.
>> I imagine the text goes out from SF's servers simultaneously with the tow truck. These systems are often old. I wouldn't assume anything here.
If they really want to free up the spot there’s a good chance the driver is closer than the tow truck.
What does the city care? Whether it gets towed or moved by the owner it's still gone
Fines are big source of revenue for MTA. Citation would be $110 something, and if it gets towed its additional $700 for first X hours and then more later.
The OP example ticket in his info is for something like $480
There is citation fine + tow fee + administrative fee + storage fee.
https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/drive-park/towed-vehicl...
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...
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.
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...
It's vague on purpose. Just like MS13 or Tren de Aragua, it can be whatever they want it to be.
This is why the internet and HN should exist <3
> 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?
Love it! how do you use apple maps on web?
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
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs/
If you're a registered apple developer you get like 250k requests/day for free
I'd be interested in a "loserboard", i.e. who consistently writes the fewest tickets.
The loserboard I'd be interested in is which license plates consistently receive the most tickets.
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.
They are definitely people who live in their cars and don’t pay the tickets.
EDIT: did a search to see if anyone had analyzed this and here’s reporting that shows basically this. None of the top cars are remotely luxury, eg.
https://sfstandard.com/2024/04/15/parking-tickets-san-franci...
Good point. I wonder if it might be a bimodal distribution - peaks for the super poor and the super wealthy. Of course, there are more poor than wealthy, so maybe you'd need to look at the rate per capita for different income brackets.
Maybe but honestly your logic doesn’t really make any sense to me anyway. If my time is worth $10k/hr, why am I driving myself? That alone is a huge waste of money.
My only knowledge of significant parking ticket acquisition from upper classes comes from lawyers outside courthouses. I tried looking for reporting on this but it may have just been a hyper local thing to where I grew up.
Could be family, I knew the daughter of a wealthy man who used to park wherever she liked and would pay the tickets without a second thought. I never asked her about it, but given what I remember of her (very personable and naive) she probably didn't see it as a problem, she just paid them and that was it.
Having the ticket price linked to their income would immediately make the game fair. If you earn 10k/h and you need to pay a 100k ticket you will be more careful.
A millionaire in Finland got a 120k€ ticket for speeding a bit over the limit (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...). IIRC the CFO of Nokia had a similar experience.
This was our old CFO.
He would park directly in front of our office building that was located inside a large complex that had a movie theater, fancy restaurants, and all kinda stuffs like that.
They couldnt tow so they would just write a ticket for being in the spot after like 60 minutes. He racked up thousands in tickets and simply just didnt pay them. Never got in trouble either lol. Since it was private property, I guess the owners just didnt care that much. He was a super douche and ended up quitting thankfully.
This is the insight behind demand-driven parking fees. The super wealthy folks who can pay an infinite amount for the spot won't matter how much the spot costs, they'll just pay the fee.
It exists: https://www.sfmta.com/media/9654/download?inline
This appears to be a list of overpayments they haven't been able to refund, not a ranking of total fines to any given plate.
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...
For those in sf who want a reminder app to avoid street cleaning parking tickets, I built this app last year:
https://streetcleaningparking.com
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.
Someone should plot this on a heat map so we can see what areas the parking cops don't write tickets for!
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).
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...
Just add a delay.
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
The reverse engineer of the ID system is worth its pound of google riddle. Well done.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
I agree. And on top of that it would be great to have spots with ALPRs that delivery companies can pay for their use and discourage or tow non-compliant vehicles.
Covid time encouraged new food pickup priority parking spots but I don't see a lot of new thinking around emergent street use needs. We have massively increased delivery culture and micro mobility shares and city planning is lagging. (I think delivery is great - fewer car trips and just overall more efficient - my opinion).
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.
I can't speak for SF I'm in Seattle. I don't think it is incumbent on delivery drivers to do activism for their employers. That's my opinion. And I still don't understand why people don't see that the delivery driver on foot is a vulnerable user of the roads and sidewalks. We aren't perfect but we are there for the public not because we like it.
Someone else mentioned "externalizing" the cost of parking via citations. Those are expensive and a trove for the city. That sounds more like subsidising than externalizing.
As far as feeling sorry for "them" - that is a disconcerting view of a servant class.
UPS drivers don't need to write their congressperson. UPS the company can just get their lobbyists to pressure city officials to convert more street parking spaces to commercial only spaces.
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.
Ok. I understand bike lanes. I didn't say anything about more lanes, bro. I am talking about delivery vehicles and the challenges they face in urban environments. Keep in mind that a delivery driver can spend as much time on foot as they do in their vehicle. This means interacting with vehicles and bikes as a laden pedestrian. They are compromised and it can be dangerous.
Delivery vehicles reduce the number of cars on the road and therefore make it easier for bicycles to negotiate the roads. One delivery vehicle can easily replace dozens of car trips.
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.
>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.
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.
Don't think I've ever seen traffic wardens referred to as "parking cops" before. Is that a common usage in America?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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]
Note that 21209 does not say "otherwise permitted" but "permitted." One interpratation (perhaps what the DMV is using) is that, since curb parking is generally permitted, parking in a bike lane that abuts the curb would also be generally permitted.
The city I live in put up "no parking in bike lane" signs everywhere, presumably to address this ambiguity.
FWIW the DMV test question was bad in other ways; it was a multiple choice asking "Which of these is not an illegal place to park:" with the correct answer being "in a bike lane." My daughter got it wrong not just because of not knowing the answer, but also because the double-negative confused her.
What was the double negative? You haven't included one in your telling of the question ("Which of these is not an illegal place to park:" with the correct answer being "in a bike lane." - that's just a single negative...)
Not and illegal. "Which of these is a legal place to park" is more clear.
Ah, I hadn't thought of illegal as counting for a double negative - it's not one for how I think, but I totally see both why you said it and why it would be a double negative for some people! Thanks for explaining
The CA drivers handbook has several issues like this. For instance, despite its insistence, it is not illegal to change lanes in an intersection.
It is however usually unwise/dickish to do so. Hence why it is in the test that way.
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.
I haven't found SF311 very responsive to requests related to illegal parking. Even if they respond, wouldn't the car be gone by the time they show up?
Yeah, they ignore SF311 reports by policy. I've managed it by flagging down an amazingly helpful parking control officer that happened to be in the area, or else by calling and reporting an obstruction of traffic (not mentioning the bike lane) and then waiting until the PCO arrived and talking to them.
The officers have almost always been helpful, but I think they generally tend towards lower confrontation and more "efficient" violations like street sweeping or expired meters by default (or perhaps directed by management).
e.g.
- Do you call 311 or a different number?
- How soon have you had someone arrive at the scene?
This was years ago when I was younger and had more free time. I called SFMTA traffic directly (you learn the menu tree quickly). It varied but I want to say it usually took between 20 minutes to over an hour, including multiple callbacks to check on status and ensure they knew I was serious
Thank you for sharing that. It clears up my confusion. I thought perhaps you had found some magic way to get them to do something without you needing to disrupt your day.
It doesn't seem worth the time investment, as it won't have any effect beyond the particular incident you're reporting. It won't increase the threat of enforcement such that people decide not to break the law.
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.
I think you might have misinterpreted that rule?
It is for light rail/trolleys (not buses) and only when you're on a two-way road and there's room to pass on the right. It also applies when they're moving, not just when they're stopped.
Basically, if a trolley/light rail has tracks in one of the left lanes of a two-way road, you must pass on the right unless directed otherwise by a traffic cop.
The reason is that these vehicles obstruct vision and you're not allowed to overtake and pass on the left when you can't see oncoming traffic or when approaching an intersection/grade/curve/oncoming traffic or your view of a bridge/viaduct/tunnel within 100 feet is obstructed.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-han...
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
I don't think needing to pass on the right is a defense against driving on the sidewalk. I think it just implies that you cannot pass while they are picking up passengers.
Yeah I think the intention is to prevent someone who disembarked from the bus and are then crossing the street from getting mowed down by a car overtaking from the bus's left. It's similar to why you can't pass a school bus when it has its stop sign out.
It was clearly a typo in the book. There’s even a diagram showing that people are loading from the right, and a sentence saying you pass on that side while passengers are loading.
If they meant “don’t pass while it is stopped”, they would have said that instead of writing the equivalent of “you can pass when [false]”
In some cities, citizens can take pictures and initiate fines when they see a violation.
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.
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?
Of course, but bad rules enforced imperfectly and good rules enforced perfectly are both categorically and morally superior to bad rules enforced perfectly because some extremist has fantasies of everyone goose stepping in perfect line.
There's pilot programs to let busses self-enforce their lanes. No uproar I've seen, most people are supportive.
> 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.
That doesn't change the fact that the laws/rules/etc across all sorts of issues are all written half baked with the assumption that enforcers will be reasonable and all sorts of edge cases don't need to be supported.
The reason illegally parked vehicles are illegal is not because they are illegal, that's circular and the peddlers of that sort of logic should be derided if not marginalized. We care about illegally parked vehicles, littering, and all manner of public nuisances because of the downside to the public of said nuisance. Absent the downside there is no reason to care. And if you automate perfect enforcement you will be inundated with tickets for situations that lack downsides that the enforcers were mostly ignoring.
> doesn't change the fact that the laws/rules/etc across all sorts of issues are all written half baked
Illegal parking is pretty black and white. I wouldn’t support citizen policing for all violations. But parking seems like a good fit.
I think you’ll find this leads to infinite fine revenue and higher congestion in pretty much all cities.
> think you’ll find this leads to infinite fine revenue and higher congestion in pretty much all cities
How? Laffer curve will max out as behaviour adjusts. And that adjustment means folks parking legally or forgoing a car or the area in question, not driving around in circles for fun.
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?
I'm being downvoted by being anything less then apologetically polite while expressing a viewpoint that isn't pro whatever the lowest common denominator wants.
That's just how comment sections that keep "rightthink score" are.
I couldn't downvote your direct reply to me, but if I could have I would have because you're being an ass. Calling me "perverted" because I don't think people should block bike lanes says way more about you than me.
Not wanting the bike lanes blocked is fine. The problem is that you want, as a means to this end, 100% enforcement of laws that were never written nor were their punishments apportioned with the expectation of such with zero regard for the consequences. That is a bad thing to be advocating for over such a mundane issue and I think it's belies a lack of moral character you often see in this subject of discussion (though you do see it in others and it's bad there too) wherein people want their preferred class of traffic prioritized using state force to the determent of all the others.
On the contrary, it is not a mundane issue. Traffic infractions and parking violations such as blocking bike lanes or crosswalks directly contribute to a less safe environment for everyone on the street. Traffic fatality is the third leading cause of preventable death in the United States. It is the cavalier attitudes of people who think they should be able to whatever they want, whenever they want with their cars that belies a lack of moral character.
People routinely die because of blocked bike lanes.
You might be downvoted regardless, as you suggest, but the guidelines are still the social contract of HN.
What you call "less than apologetically polite" I would call "not kind" and "snarky." Did you feel kindness toward the gp when you replied?
If you think you're actually following the guidelines, then you must carry on.
There is no social contract in scored internet comment sections. The herd will do what makes the number go up. If a large number of people showed up and upvoted every racist comment to the moon the verbiage in here would pivot almost overnight. Mobs don't have self awareness or free will.
I think you can't directly acknowledge the guidelines because you know you are willfully violating them.
The guidelines are the rules of the road for the community. The moral obligation to follow the guidelines is not conditional on whether you think the community is a mob. Even if you thought you have no obligation to the community, your behavior is still disrespectful to the intentions of the moderators.
The way you write makes it seem like you hold both the community and the guidelines in contempt. What is the purpose for you in participating in this community? Would it not be better for you and the community both if you stop posting like this?
Very well done! Outstanding site, it is clear and easy to use. I supposed you'll be forced offline soon due to legal threats.
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.
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.
Division I, Section 7.3.3 Obstruction of Traffic Without Permit $1,000.00
“officer, I’ve got a permit to obstruct traffic!”
Yes, things like street closures for construction, film shoots, or Neighborhood Night Outs would all need permits to obstruct traffic/close the street.
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.
I seen a post about this on insta this morning, awesome project, of course it's SF
Clever how you figured out the pattern in ticket numbers and how they relate to individual officers.
This is super fun! The apple maps look for the "Find My" feel was a really nice touch
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!
> lightning speed, the SF government changed
The most impressive thing about this. Not to diminish Riley Walz's work, which is also impressive.
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.
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 ;)
> 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.
This works and feels amazing. How are you doing the swipe up panel?
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.
Misread as "parking coops" and thought this was some interesting new concept of community-owned parking lots.
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
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.
traffic enforcement is pretty much the only cashflow positive city business
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”
Nice apple-like design, looks really good! Especially those three dots in the top-left.
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.
Tolled roads? Oh yes. With surge pricing? Ah fuck yeah. Come on!
wow, great work. But is this legal? Feels like no and will be takendown
Cool app! What a pity. I wish we had more of them here in SOMA. Big open void.
Awesome. The leading officer in the dashboard should have a raise :)
Thats cool. Would be nice to see annual median take from each warden.
This is awesome. Coolest hacker demo I've seen in a while.
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?
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.
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.
Market rate is $4.10 per hour during peak hours. But it falls off precipitously per hour and ceases to be enforced around 6pm. For overstays those little white golf cart trucks have cameras that check license plates for permits. I recently got a parking permit for $200 or so after paying like $500 in tickets for various infractions including “Parking on Grades, wheels straight”. So I very much want anyone overstaying a 2hr parking spot to get tickets and or towed to make room. And I can speak from experience having just recently being towed, that the parking downtown is ruthlessly enforced. It will cost you about $700 if you’re towed.
I've always wondered what the market rate for parking would be if you allowed for things other than parking like restaurant tables, a shed, a tiny skyscraper...
Exactly. It's not much of a market if 99% of potential uses of the land are prohibited.
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.
That's more or less how Tokyo works. Almost no on-street parking, people have to prove that they have a parking spot when buying a car, liberal zoning so there are lots of very small pay parking lots around the city. It works really well IMO but it would be politically very difficult in North America.
Ah yes, the free market, which tends to always work in favor of the majority of people and common good.
The people own the land and as such, deserve to receive it's full value. Charging $0 is stealing from the people to give to car drivers.
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
Opposition must come through legal means, because the cheapness and omnipresence of enforcement is only getting better, especially for SFPD on the tech front.
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.
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
This is amazing. Can we get a heat map of ticket disbursements?
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.
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...
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.
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.
Thanks for clarifying! So basically his van kept getting towed and he kept losing business as a result? Presumably it also cost him to recover his vehicle. So in summary, if you got on this list you're just permanently screwed in SF? And you can get on this list by paying a fine twice by accident?
> "?towid=1"
Funnily, incrementing that number in the country I live in would itself be a crime. If the company I did this to found out, they could probably take me to court and win.
A wonderful world we live in. :)
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.
More likely is he paid a ticket incorrectly. Someone said he paid the same ticket twice instead of paying each ticket once. Then the city racked up delinquency fines while making little to no effort to inform him of these fines or the outstanding ticket. One day, he gets towed and can't get his van back until thousands of dollars in fines and penalties are paid from a ticket that he thought had been taken care of long 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.
I think he got two tickets but paid one of them twice and forgot to pay the other one.
Just to confirm, this is what happened - he paid one twice, and therefore the other became delinquent. However, if you file a FOIA request with the SFMTA and do some basic analysis on how much is "owed per license plate", you will see that certain license plates have been allowed to accrue tens of thousands of dollars in parking fines with virtually no towing repercussions, going back as far as data is available (2013). Around 80-90% of these vehicles are rental cars, around 5-8% of them are commercial trucking companies which absorb the cost of 2 tickets per day, and this tiny 1% of license plates are effectively "lawless parkers" who drive high-end cars and accrue tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid parking fines every year.
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
> street sweeping fines
Why the hell does SF need to sweep the streets so much?
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.
From all the trash that everyone leaves everywhere. and broken glass from car windows getting smashed in. its not a nice place.
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
> 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.
It was great while it lasted.
So incredibly cool I want this
Hey @OP, make a leader board for the license plate with the most infractions
can you find out how much revenue the city makes each week with those tickets?
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
You can look at the leaderboard at the end of the day and sum the daily intake if you want.
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.
This is solved with better infrastructure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_extension
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.
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?
Waste of what resources?
If anything I'd expect the sidewalk to be cheaper.
There's a difference between starting from scratch and modifying existing infrastructure
There is.
But the post saying it's a better method isn't suggesting extra labor to do modifications. That's useful just as pure knowledge, and also it can be applied into future designs or when parts of the road wear out.
In Seattle, I've mostly seen approaches such as this as a modification. Though I see your point in a new construction situation.
the picture on that article looks like a nice stripy parking space
A car could push into the first third of it, but visibility would be fine in that case. Trying to use the whole thing in a car would mean you're jutting into the traffic lane, and anyone willing to do that is causing bigger problems. And if a bike parks in the stripes that's fine for visibility too.
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.
This is now illegal in some states
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...
It makes sense. It was ridiculous that they were originally proposing ticketing people without there being signage that it was illegal to park there. They need to just paint the curbs.
Is it ridiculous to ticket someone who parks in the middle of Market St if there's no sign that it's illegal?
No. Driving a car is a privilege, and a dangerous one at that, which requires a competency test. It is not unreasonable to expect licensed drivers to know the statewide laws that govern that privilege without reminder signs.
>> Is it ridiculous to ticket someone who parks in the middle of Market St if there's no sign that it's illegal?
I saw someone just parked in the right lane (of two) heading up California street at maybe Mason. Just sitting there reading a book. <!>
While I agree on this, the US is a bit special as having a car is considered mandatory.
IMHO, that culture needs to be changed: better public transport and walkable cities.
When that is established, then it is also easier to revoke the drivers privilege.
In some ways, yes, though not in many cities like SF, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, etc.
But it's also a chicken and egg problem: often transit is not viable or is too slow precisely because everything is devoted to cars. The SF Van Ness BRT is an excellent example - I used to routinely get off the 49 bus and walk faster than it stuck in car traffic, but after the BRT the bus is a much better and faster experience than driving could ever be.
One of the most common reasons for watering down or canceling pedestrian, transit, and biking infra projects is a refusal to negatively impact driving in any way, even if the net societal benefit (especially to lower income households who take transit at much higher rates) is far greater.
Good governance requires sometimes unpopular choices (see Paris's recent bicycle transformation, or SF's recent recall election over the creation of a new public park in place of a redundant street)
> The SF Van Ness BRT is an excellent example - I used to routinely get off the 49 bus and walk faster than it stuck in car traffic
It's funny that you use that particular example considering the SF Supervisors of 1958 are the ones who created that problem by refusing to build the elevated freeway that transit planning engineers correctly envisioned we would need. Tearing down the stub end of it also created the most dangerous intersection in the city at Market & Octavia. As a pedestrian it would be so nice to have cars elevated up off the ground instead of having to wait to cross on foot. A lot of intersections of Octavia and its cross streets don't even allow pedestrian crossing at all lmfao
Having a car in SF is not mandatory. It's quite useful but you can live well without.
I don't believe any of the above are outlier or unreasonable positions to have.
Yet a family in that situation would severely struggle to fit everything in if they had to rely solely on public transport to get between home, school and after-school activities.
(I grew up in London, where public transport is often faster than driving. In San Francisco, most of my car journeys would take 3-4 times as long by public transport.)
Admittedly, public transport is garbage. And for the time we'd go to La Petite Baleen, a car is 0.5x the time. So in that respect I agree. In Mission Bay everything else is close by.
But I think perhaps if someone told me "We don't live well. I can only take my child to swim class on the weekends" I would think that somewhat strange.
Re: La Petite Baleen: 34 mins vs 1 hour 11 mins for me.
My son's swim school is 20 mins away by car, or 60 mins by public transport.
I take your point that these are first world problems.
But my point is that not having access to a car in San Francisco is a significant inconvenience and it's incorrect to say 'you can live well' without that access. You might not be so inconvenienced that you would say "we don't live well", but there's a 'meh' zone in between the two.
I wouldn't say it's "meh" that you can take your kids to swim school only on weekends.
LPB is 23 vs 39 for me but I do drive. Either way I wouldn't think it "meh".
But I suppose standards of living in the US are by default so far ahead of other places that these are considered the minimum to not be "meh" here.
- the time between now and the journey start time
- delays
So you would need to budget an hour each way, i.e. a total of 2.5 hours for a 30 minute swim lesson.
Imagine doing that for every single thing you need to do.
Normally I'd agree with you, but I can pick my swim lesson time and I don't have to worry about headway timing because I know when to leave and the train is timed. For untimed services, certainly I'd believe it.
These are complaints of generality that don't have relevance in the specific case.
Why? Having a driver's license is a privilege that requires you to study and know the rules of the road. The onus is on you to know the rules.
There are also international tourists who may have different local parking rules than the ones in SF. Having clear demarcations between allowed and non allowed parking areas makes it easier for everyone to follow the correct rules.
Do you have an rss feed of road rules piped into Anki cards or what?
Or just maybe "driver's license is a privilege that requires you to study and know the rules of the road" is a fallacious claim that rests on pedantic legal formalism and an impoverished sense of human psychology.
No, I don't; there are plenty of places you can't legally park that do not have painted curbs or "No Parking" signage. Do we also need curbs and signage near every fire hydrant? How about every driveway? Can drivers double-park anywhere they want? Should they yield to pedestrians in crosswalks? Etc. etc.
Reviewing the thread, the context is newly enforcing something that might not be illegal in all jurisdictions. Citing different contexts where signage is not always used doesn't change the fact that the discussion focuses on change in common practice in a specific context. In fact, I observe plenty of signage for fire hydrants and driveways in places where people commonly make parking errors.
The question still stands. How do you ensure you detect changes rules of the road in order to maintain your privilege?
You enforce them; if I get a ticket for parking at an intersection, I won't do it again!
(Also, in the specific context of this discussion, parking restrictions near intersections are super common; this is not some esoteric new law that has been introduced. See https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...)
How bizarre, this rule is enforced across most of EU without signage and somehow most people cope. Why wouldn't Americans?
It isn't bizarre that rules and practice vary widely in different cultural contexts. Even your claim is caveated as "most of EU," recognizing that it might not be the same in all places.
In many places in the US, there is a culture of legibility, whereby informational affordances are relevantly and generously provisioned. This allows for more certainty for both facility users and rule enforcers. On the flip side, there are a lot of signs all over the place.
The law has been widely communicated.
You could argue that people cannot be expected to carry tape measures with them, because their glove compartments are too small.
But the difficulty of judging the distance from the intersection is a factor in a minority of cases.
SFMTA could have chosen to enforce the law but allow a tolerance of 5 feet. That would start providing safety benefits earlier without surprising any driver who made an honest mistake in their estimate of the distance.
Portland does the same thing since most blocks in the older parts of town are 200 feet. Reserving 20 feet at either end would take away a huge chunk of street parking in residential areas built before driveways were common.
It's also why our light rail trains can only be two cars long.
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.
Hasn’t this been illegal in all states since the beginning of traffic laws?
This rule removed something like 10% of all parking spaces in SF.
I would pay ~$10/month for email alerts when an officer is within a geofence of my car.
Then someone will know where your car is at all times, and probably who you are... and that is monetizable (not from you).
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.
Someone probably already does. Every car sold within the last 20 years has tracking electronics and can be remotely crippled or shut down.
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.)
Often times, even if you pay, you're still the product a company sells.
If there is someone who wants this data, I am happy to sell... no need for a middle man.
Nice to see historical data to show ticket density somehow (different areas have very different enforcement)
I'm missing something here. How did you get the dataset for this? And that too, in real-time?
Explained here: https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/
https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/
ahh thank you!
Explained here
https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/
ahh thank you!
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?
$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.
Great job!!
Fascinating and good to see enforcement actually occuring
Is this real time? I don't see anything moving.
Amazing!
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?
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.
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...
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.
Cars turn people into sociopaths.
this guy never misses
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.
Funny, people don't think it was reasonable for the FAA to do the same with protecting private citizens travel data
Wish we had officers like that in NYC :,)
They're too busy parking in bike lanes.
Grove Street, home
Need to pair this with an API for Tesla FSD so that cars just move themselves automatically
Or just pay the very reasonable fee for storing your private property on public land.
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.
Believe it or not, parking reformists tend to agree! The fact we even have a parking "fine" indicates that it isn't really priced right; if you park somewhere you should just pay the market rate for doing so, whether it's for 30 minutes or 30 days.
The legendary Donald Shoup (who sadly died this year) https://www.shoupdogg.com/ - writes about this in The High Cost of Free Parking
> (b) Parking signs are too goddamn hard to parse, that's the real problem.
Product idea: a smartphone app that uses your GPS location to tell you how many tickets have been given at a specific location, how recently, and the day/time distribution.
Then pair that with an AI model that's trained on the signage to be able to parse what it says, and I bet you could very accurately predict whether a given spot is at risk of getting you a ticket.
Every time I drive in SF, I pay for parking, and then get a parking ticket.
Apparently I'm supposed to know that a red parking meter is for trucks. The "trucks-only sign", if there was even supposed to be one, wasn't attached to that meter or the parking sign.
The other time I was the first to arrive on a block, and paid the wrong meter out of confusion.
another riley walz banger!!!
Yeah, slowly going through https://walzr.com/. Definitely not his first rodeo.
Worth it for this jpeg:
https://walzr.com/HDR2.jpg
What would really be incredible would be if the city made this kind of data public intentionally.
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.
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.
Incredible!
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.
> 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.