It was 1 p.m. on a typical Monday, and one of San Francisco’s more enterprising parking control officers had been trawling the streets since about 6 a.m.
During that time, the officer had zigzagged through the Mission District, climbed the hills of Noe Valley and looped the base of Twin Peaks, handing out 78 tickets – and $8,190 in fines.
Software engineer Riley Walz had traced the officer’s route using a home-built app, which plotted each violation on a map. The resulting picture was a study in speed and efficiency: Around noon, for example, this worker zipped through a street-cleaning zone in Diamond Heights, handing out nine tickets in about 20 minutes.
“I love looking at data like this,” said Walz, a North Beach resident, who created the app to follow the city’s 325 parking control officers in real time and better understand their patterns.
“You’d see those little cars driving by all over the place, but we never really knew where they’d been or where they’re going,” Walz continued, explaining why he wrote a script to check batches of citations every three minutes. The idea was simple, if imaginative: Let anyone drill into the once-mystifying world of San Francisco parking enforcement.
When he posted the link on social media Tuesday morning, it swiftly went viral with more than 1 million views. Within hours, the script no longer worked. Walz believes officials at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency had cut the data flow by obscuring some information he had been scraping, including the location of each citation and the identity of the responding officer.
“We made sure that all access to citation data was via authorized routes,” an SFMTA spokesperson said in a statement, which assured that while the agency seeks to be transparent, its leaders can’t risk the safety of staff, or the possibility of people’s personal information getting leaked. Parking citation records are still accessible through the public website DataSF.
Walz had launched his project out of curiosity, at a moment when the SFMTA is ramping up citations for everything from blocking driveways to overstaying at meters, to commandeering bus stops. Aiming to generate more money annually while also maintaining an ample stock of residential and downtown parking spaces, SFMTA recently became more strategic, using data to decide where to deploy officers, empowering them with license plate-reader technology and increasing the number who work on weekends. While some motorists have accused the city of a “war on cars,” SFMTA officials have expressed pride in the results. The agency is trying to patch a $322 million deficit, and any revenue stream helps.
“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,” representatives of the agency said. “We welcome any creative uses of technology to encourage legal parking,” she added, “but we also want to make sure that our employees are able to do their jobs safely, and without disruption.”
A 23-year-old tech worker, Walz said he has no particular animus towards the people patrolling San Francisco streets for parking infractions. He doesn’t own a car, and therefore has never experienced the aggravation of pulling a piece of paper from his windshield and realizing it signifies a very expensive mistake.
Software engineer Riley Walz, a San Francisco resident, created an app that tracks the city’s parking cops in real time. (Rachel Swan / The Chronicle)
But Walz is fascinated by the quotidian rhythms of the city, including parking patrol. He tries to find ways to illustrate daily life with data. Last year, for instance, Walz installed a scruffy Android phone on a pole in the Mission District and programmed it to use the song-identifying app Shazam 24/7. Walz ported the resulting soundtrack – a wall-to-wall mix of boom boxes, car stereos, buskers’ guitars and beats wafting from storefronts – onto a public website. Called “Bop Spotter,” it played on the technology of the ShotSpotter gunfire detection system, but purported to catch “vibes” rather than criminals.
Some of his projects are cheeky and whimsical. Others serve a more serious or utilitarian purpose. A 911 call stream application logs emergencies in San Francisco in four-hour datasets. A random route generator finds destinations for runners or cyclists. Walz’s latest innovation, the “Find My Parking Cops” platform, borrows Apple’s “Find My Friends” interface to produce a cartographic representation of San Francisco parking tickets. It provides a sense of object permanence to the officers whizzing around in their three-wheeled cars, but stops short of anticipating where exactly they’ll go, or when they will write the next citation.
Parking enforcement seen at Mission Street and Geneva Avenue in San Francisco in 2024. A new app shows parking tickets being handed out in real time, including the routes used by parking officers. (Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle)
Like many of Walz’ ideas, “Find My Parking Cops” required ingenuity and a little exploration of the city’s web portals. By perusing the SFMTA website, Walz found that officers issue tickets in a sequential – but not consecutive – order. With the aid of artificial intelligence, he was able to predict citation identification numbers and write a script that continuously captures them, dumping the data onto a website.
Looking at the map, Walz drew conclusions about how parking tickets work, in a city that’s famous for them. Officers appear to work in pairs tackling street cleaning areas, possibly to maximize productivity. On a typical weekday, many citations appear to be clustered downtown, with other hot spots in the Mission and near Chase Center in Mission Bay. The most prolific officers can dole out a hundred tickets in a shift. Some crisscross neighborhoods while others stake out a specific location: One officer drew a big haul by lingering near the Hyatt Regency hotel on Drumm Street, targeting scofflaws who parked in a bus zone.
That’s where Walz stood on Tuesday morning, obsessively checking his phone to see if the officer would swing by. Already, the bus stop outside the Hyatt Regency had been a frenzy of enforcement activity, with 12 tickets dispensed in exactly two hours, from 7:59 a.m. to 9:59 a.m.
And the violations had not stopped. At 11 a.m. Walz stood watch – phone in hand, backpack slung over one shoulder, face knotted in concentration beneath his floppy brown hair – drivers kept pulling into the red zone, idling leisurely as they waited for a passenger to climb out, pull luggage from the trunk and saunter toward the hotel.
One man in a blue Jaguar spent seven minutes in the bus zone before cutting his engine. A woman slowly emerged from the front seat, pulling out a pizza box along with several shopping bags, and setting them gingerly on the sidewalk.
Again, Walz checked his phone. Shortly before 11:30 a.m., a new ticket appeared as a bubble arrow on the app, about five blocks from the Hyatt, at Spear and Folsom streets. Officers were hustling: From Monday at midnight to Tuesday at 2 p.m. 163 of them had issued 7,954 tickets, and logged $865,054 in fines.
Downtown, the little cars kept circling.
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