Find SF parking cops(walzr.com) |
Find SF parking cops(walzr.com) |
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?
> $158
> 99 Grove St
> 10:43 AM • Truck
> Blocking bike lane
It currently has 22 million parking tickets dating back to 2008.
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.
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.
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...
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
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?
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.
More, I worry about the chance a deranged person uses it to track a specific SFMTA agent who gave them a ticket.
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.
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.
“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.
That was fast! I missed it.
The most impressive thing about this. Not to diminish Riley Walz's work, which is also impressive.
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.
"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?
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).
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.
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....
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]”
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?
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).
by calling and reporting an obstruction of traffic
e.g.
- Do you call 311 or a different number?
- How soon have you had someone arrive at the scene?
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.
Illegal parking is pretty black and white. I wouldn’t support citizen policing for all violations. But parking seems like a good fit.
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.
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.
It is however usually unwise/dickish to do so. Hence why it is in the test that way.
That's just how comment sections that keep "rightthink score" are.
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.
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 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.
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”
Then they could see where they're under-patrolling and adjust their routes to fill in the gaps.
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.
In general, the idea of a "market rate" for any given property depends fundamentally on a system of property rights actually being enforced.
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
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...
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.
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.
> 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
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.
(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.
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.
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.
Incurring higher costs than revenue is a common cause of business failures.
Oh well.
Why the hell does SF need to sweep the streets so much?
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 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
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.
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...
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.
I agree 100% though that not having street parking at all is the way to go. My arguments about market pricing is more of a second best option – if the city is going to continue to provide land for this specific use, then we shouldn’t subsidize it or treat as a special case.
> "?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. :)
The legendary Donald Shoup (who sadly died this year) https://www.shoupdogg.com/ - writes about this in The High Cost of Free Parking
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.
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.
If anything I'd expect the sidewalk to be cheaper.
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.
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.
I saw someone just parked in the right lane (of two) heading up California street at maybe Mason. Just sitting there reading a book. <!>
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.
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.
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.
It's also why our light rail trains can only be two cars long.
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.(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...)
1. Media campaigns (posters, PR etc.).
2. A multi-month period last year during which they issues 'warning' tickets (with nothing for the driver to pay).
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.
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)
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
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.)
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.
Your claim is now tickets are the loss function for building one's road rule model? What happened to the requirement for study?
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.
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.
LPB is 23 vs 39 for me but I do drive. Either way I wouldn't think it "meh".
- 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.
These are complaints of generality that don't have relevance in the specific case.
> 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 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).
So wait.
cop-spotter is brought to you by the people who brought you bop-spotter?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Great work though, this is rad.
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 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.
If you're a registered apple developer you get like 250k requests/day for free
[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...
Anyone have a screenshot?
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).
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...
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.
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.
> 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
1. https://italysegreta.com/dop-ingredients-of-neapolitan-pizza...
Shotspotter not related co.
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.
You can use any prime afaik for this example but your number space will be limited.
Used in IBAN bank account numbers, EU VAT numbers (UK, FR, BE), etc
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.
> is offended by non-conformity
> During street sweeping hours, you may not park until the street has been physically swept.
Thank you!
https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/drive-park/towed-vehicl...
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...
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.
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.
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.
> super wealthy people
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
https://apnews.com/article/biden-trump-macron-bodyguards-sec...
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.
Apparently there must be some upside to allowing parking violations, if the perpetrator values it more than whatever low 'punishment' fee is set. Otherwise society would increase the fee to get the right behaviour.
No.
“In the United States, tax evasion constitutes a crime” [1].
IDK what plane this policy spectrum exists on but man is horseshoe theory clearly alive and well on it.
because they should express remorse and handle your car with care vs you know, putting out that fire?
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.
So I can see where your BIL is coming from.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... that actually also sounds useful
i don't see why they shouldnt be tracked while working
this is why I come to HN
People it seems have stopped wanting for fix or reform the system.
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.
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!)
Are you against ICE agent tracking apps as well?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Citizens can't hold public officials accountable when they're only accountable to other public officials.
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...
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.
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.
Why is it unfair that they also be tracked?
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
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!
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.
> 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...
All things I’ve been ticketed for or towed for in SF. Those mfuckers just out to make money. They literally write more tickets when sfmta has a budget shortfall. It’s not about public order it’s about revenue.
Parking enforcement people are not police officers, nor do they have any of the powers of one.