“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,” an SFMTA representative said in an emailed statement on Tuesday afternoon, after Walz’s site was no longer functional. “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.”
Ticket Master
The idea for Find My Parking Cops was first sparked when Walz’s roommate got a parking fine. Walz noticed the nine-digit identification number on the ticket and started looking for patterns. By using publicly available information, he believed he cracked the code.
“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,” Walz wrote in a blog post explaining the site. “So, the ticket after 984,946,606 is actually 984,946,610, and after that is 984,946,621.”
He suspected this absurd-seeming pattern was due to limitations baked into the software used by parking control officers. Whatever its reason for existing, the pattern of sequential ticket IDs, paired with parking officers likely claiming batches of ticket numbers, meant Walz was able to track their routes by plotting each parking ticket on a map as soon as it was entered into the system. A car owner could look at the activity of the officers currently out on patrol and see if any of them were slowly descending on their neighborhood.
Last year, parking officials in San Francisco issued over a million tickets within city limits, which amounted to over $100 million in fines for car owners. “I actually don’t have a car, but I have plenty of friends that talk about it,” says Walz. Like most costs in San Francisco, these tickets can quickly add up. For example, forgetting to move your car during the weekly street sweeping—an error my household has made more than once—will cost you $90 every time.
Dude, Where’s My Parking Cop?
The website’s live updates were pulled from the city government’s website and visualized on an Apple Map. Find My Parking Cops tracked the routes of individual parking control officers, giving them each unique visual identifiers, as well as their cadence of tickets.
On Tuesday, for example, the site displayed one officer seemingly starting their shift around 10:30 am and handing out 35 tickets over the next few hours as they patrolled a neighborhood in Lower Pacific Heights. The citations logged were primarily for expired meters, which costs $107 per ticket, and not having a residential permit, which costs $108 per ticket. In total, the fines racked up by that one officer over a few hours amounted to almost $4,000.