A viral app that helped San Franciscans avoid parking tickets has been killed by the city, its creator says.
The app, which launched Tuesday, allows people to see the location of parking cops in close to real time. It even includes a leaderboard showing which officers made the city the most money that week: Officer 0336 racked up more than $15,000 before the app was rendered useless.
After the app, dubbed “Find My Parking Cops,” was live for just four hours, the city changed its website so that parking citations are no longer publicly viewable.
“Ahhhhhh … the MTA just changed their site so I am no longer getting data!” the creator, Riley Walz, texted The Standard at 2:34 p.m.
San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson Erica Kato said the city changed its site to protect parking cops.
“Citations are a tool to ensure compliance with parking laws, which help keep our streets safe and use our limited curb space efficiently and fairly,” Kato said in an email. “We welcome creative uses of technology to encourage legal parking, but we also want to make sure that our employees are able to do their jobs safely, and without disruption.”
It’s not the first time the city has gone after a civic-minded app. San Francisco’s 311 service threatened to shut down an API needed for the AI-enabled Solve SF 311 reporting app to work, until a solution was worked out.
In a viral X post Tuesday that has racked up nearly a million views, Walz heralds his hacker project that allowed San Franciscans to track and avoid the city’s infamous parking enforcement officers.
Walz, who is known for helping create a fake New York City steakhouse, said the parking app, beyond its obvious utility, is a data trove that could inspire other projects. He said he plans to make the data downloadable as a spreadsheet so San Franciscans can figure out where they’re most likely to get a parking ticket.
Walz, who admits he’s not “pro or anti parking cop,” got the idea after seeing violation notices for graffiti tacked to the side of buildings. He saw that the notices had a complaint ID and that the way complaint numbers were assigned followed predictable patterns and were published online by the city. He wondered if the same was true with parking tickets and their ID numbers and, lo and behold, it was.
The map works by using a web scraping tool that scans copies of tickets uploaded to the city’s payment portal website, and looks for them by guessing the new ID number for tickets issued on a given day. By scanning the website every few seconds, it can see where tickets are being written in close to real time.
Walz had already spotted some interesting patterns in the data. One officer sits by the Hyatt Regency near the Ferry Building, writing tickets against cars illegally parked at the white curb behind the hotel. That officer issued 12 tickets at 50 Drumm St. on Tuesday between 7:59 a.m. and 9:59 a.m., racking up $3,976 in fines.
But that’s a trifle compared to an officer in Noe Valley, who issued 63 tickets and $6,617 in fines Tuesday.
At that rate, they’ll have closed the SFMTA’s $320 million projected budget deficit in 132 years.