A chef in her 20s. A 49-year-old man living in Chinatown. A UPS driver. 

These are some of the people tied to the cars that received the most parking tickets in San Francisco in the last 12 months, racking up hundreds of tickets each – with distinct price tags totaling tens of thousands of dollars. 

The driver with the most tickets accrued more than $33,000 in fines across over 300 tickets between July 2025 and July 2026. A majority of her violations were for street cleaning, and were concentrated in two areas: The streets around her apparent home in the Excelsior as well as a second center near 16th street in the Mission District. She also seems to have tallied tickets in predictable clusters in the Western Addition, Presidio Heights and the Tenderloin.

Where this person was getting to, and why she had decided to ignore the mountain of tickets accruing to her name, remains a mystery to us. Along with other serial violators, she didn’t respond to requests for comment in time for publication, and we are choosing not to name her.

Based on SFMTA, DMV and voter record data, the Chronicle determined that most of the other top 10 violators were also individuals tied to traceable addresses, but two were UPS trucks, one was linked to a used auto parts company and another was tied to a San Francisco charter bus, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. All 10 of them received at least 200 tickets and a total of $20,000 or more in penalties in the last year. 

“Making deliveries in urban environments, including San Francisco, poses challenges for companies in several industries because of available parking for commercial vehicles,” UPS wrote in a statement to the Chronicle. “UPS drivers are taught to park safely and legally and be as expedient as possible on all deliveries to minimize parking time.”    

In an email to the Chronicle, SFMTA shared resources about how to park legally and avoid parking tickets. “The goal of parking enforcement is not to punish drivers, but to increase compliance and parking turnover so traffic on our streets can move safely,” the organization wrote in a statement.

That admonition clearly didn’t affect the behavior of the most regular scofflaws: In fact, the geographic patterns of their tickets betray a remarkable regularity in their movements.

Some notched almost all of their tickets in roughly the same place, like one driver who netted 250 tickets around the 16th Street Mission BART Station – one or two out of every three days on average – or another who was given almost all their tickets around a single street in Chinatown. Meanwhile, the vehicle registered to a charter bus company regularly got tickets in exactly four locations, scattered from the Marina to Hayes Valley to the Castro to the Upper Haight – perhaps in evidence of its regular stops.

The city offers a one-time free removal of all parking tickets on a vehicle for people experiencing homelessness – but notably, none of the vehicles registered to the top 10 violators had such a waiver, according to data through April 2026. 

The vehicles with the highest enforcement make up only a small portion of overall tickets, making up fewer than 1% of all fines. Vehicles that got just one ticket accounted for about half of all violations last year. Previous Chronicle reports found that the highest rates of tickets per capita are concentrated around downtown – perhaps not surprisingly, given the large share of visitors and workers to those neighborhoods.

That reporting found that out of the more than 1.5 million tickets given out last year, the highest enforcement was for street cleaning, residential overtime and meters. 

The number of tickets given out each year has risen steadily since the pandemic, but there are set to be fewer recorded violations by the end of 2026. If the number stays on track in the latter half of the year, it would represent a nearly 27% decrease from the year prior.

One exception to this drop is the number of tickets given out for large vehicles, which San Francisco started enforcing in November 2025. So far in 2026, the number of violations given out is more than quadruple the number for all of 2025.

Oversize vehicles, including RVs, are prohibited from being parked in one place for over two hours. Violators face a $108 fine and potential towing. The city started a large vehicle refuge permit program, designed as a temporary exemption for people living out of large vehicles while the city works to coordinate support. Some people experiencing homelessness who live in large vehicles have told the Chronicle that they plan to stay, despite the enforcement efforts. 

The median fine in the last year across all tickets was $107. The single most expensive one was a $974 ticket for a vehicle blocking a crosswalk.

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This article originally published at These are San Francisco’s most ticketed cars. See how much it cost their drivers.