Engineer helped people avoid parking tickets with tracker. No more, CA city says
An engineer tried to solve one of San Francisco’s biggest headaches — parking tickets — but the city quickly said no more.
Riley Walz, a San Francisco resident who has been recently deemed the social media platform X’s “Peter Park-er,” decided to show his take on Apple’s Find My Friends feature: Find My Parking Cops, he said in a Sept. 23 post.
The website is straightforward, mimicking the Find My Friends interface, along with a leaderboard that shows how much money parking enforcement officers give out in tickets.
Although this website wouldn’t be of much use to Walz as he doesn’t have a car, his roommate does and recently got a citation, Walz wrote on the website.
The idea came after Walz was looking at all the listed parking ticket information issued by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, when he noticed the ticket’s citation number, he told Wired.
“After digging for a while, I’m pretty sure I know how. It seems each possible ticket number follows a pattern: add 11, except add 4 if the last digit is 6. So no ticket can end in 7, 8, or 9. So the ticket after 984,946,606 is actually 984,946,610, and after that is 984,946,621,” he said on the site.
Then he started scraping the information, and as soon as a ticket was written, it became available to his website, he said.
But not for long.
“In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of the site going live. I can’t get data from it anymore,” Walz wrote.
San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson Erica Kato told McClatchy News on Sept. 24 that “we made sure that all access to citation data was via authorized routes. SFMTA is transparent about our transportation data, and will continue to be. But when our staff’s safety, and personal information of people who have received parking citations, is at risk, we must act on that swiftly.
“The official way to access our parking citation data is via our public website on DataSF. Anyone is still able to see type of citation, date of issuance and data that can be mapped and analyzed on DataSF daily.”
In 2023, San Francisco officials issued nearly 1.2 million parking tickets, leading to $119 million worth of fines for either blocking street cleaners, not refilling the meter or other violations, The San Francisco Standard reported.
Kato told The San Francisco Standard that “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. 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.”
Walz, who’s a serial engineer, is the creator of other creative endeavors like Bop Spotter, a microphone placed in San Francisco’s Mission district that uses Shazam, the app used to identify songs, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week for the soul purpose of “catching vibes,” he said on his website.
As for how quickly city officials shut down Walz’s endeavor, someone poked fun by saying, “lasted longer than a fully paid SF parking meter.”