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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As soon as the bodycams oh so requested by the Left were worn, it became slowly clear who the majority of perpetrators are in Cops vs. Blacks, Antifa, white liberal women... Now the Left's opinion seems to turn against these.
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!)
If it just showed where the cars were, that would be much better. Although still questionable IMHO.
(Even though respecting privacy would mean that a massive number of HN techbros would quickly be unemployed.)
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).
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...
"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.
https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/drive-park/how-avoid-pa...
(Just a random hypothetical thought, I'm not saying that is the case or their motivation, only that it theoretically could be)
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.
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.
"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]
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.
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.
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?
No illegally parked vehicles?
The negative externalities of illegally parked vehicles charged to the source?
I'll dream of that.
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?
Still great though. That would have saved me $500 6 years ago.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So wait.
cop-spotter is brought to you by the people who brought you bop-spotter?
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.
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.
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.
So I found the fees for July 2025[1]. My fine was $108 and not $68
But also they made errors in publishing their fees, they claimed it didn't increase this year, but it did [2] - and asked the AI to find all the other inconsistencies.
So now I wonder if I should ask for $40 back. That's a dramatic increase, and seems like the intent was it to stay at $68
[1] https://www.sfmta.com/media/42628/download?inline [2] https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/3330732a-2bd1-497d-ab...
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...
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).
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?
Overstaying (aka overconsumption) is mostly just a predictable consequence of selling something valuable at far below what its value.
You can make a report on the 311 website, mobile app, or by calling 311. You receive a tracking number to monitor the response.
F this supposed see the other side question.
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
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.
So if you've got a ticket, there almost certainly was a sweeper that came by at that time.
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.
That's insanity. Turns out more than just thieves are thieves in SF.
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 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.
Oh well.
Why the hell does SF need to sweep the streets so much?
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.
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?
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.
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 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
If you're a registered apple developer you get like 250k requests/day for free
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.
“officer, I’ve got a permit to obstruct traffic!”
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.
> 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
> $158
> 99 Grove St
> 10:43 AM • Truck
> Blocking bike lane
From the limited dataset it looks the last digit comes from:
last digit = (<sum of previous the digits> + 2) mod 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)
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
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...
Then they could see where they're under-patrolling and adjust their routes to fill in the gaps.
It currently has 22 million parking tickets dating back to 2008.
I don't like these kind of apps that allow people to be smart around regulations that should apply for everyone.
> I don't like these kind of apps that allow people to be smart around regulations that should apply for everyone.
> 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.
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.
Great work though, this is rad.
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.
Anyone have a screenshot?
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...
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?
More, I worry about the chance a deranged person uses it to track a specific SFMTA agent who gave them a ticket.
That was fast! I missed it.
The most impressive thing about this. Not to diminish Riley Walz's work, which is also impressive.
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”