They started their example pattern with an citation number 984,946,606 they said wasn't valid rather than 984,946,605 given initially (and shown in the image).
Just a mistake, I imagine. Probably just typed the pattern out starting with the last number they wrote, which unfortunately was invalid.
> 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
Seems weird to me (from nowhere near SF) that some of the cheapest things to do are to block fire stations, fire hydrants and 'fire lanes' (I assume that's like a bus lane but for fire engines, in places that's common enough for whatever reason, like right by a fire station?) - wheelchair/disability related stuff is much more penalised, but even all sorts of other 'regular' mis-parking seems for some reason slightly more expensive than blocking fire crews. Odd isn't it? Have I misunderstood?
> 'fire lanes' (I assume that's like a bus lane but for fire engines, in places that's common enough for whatever reason, like right by a fire station?)
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.
Brother in law is a firefighter, gleefully is exactly the correct term here. According to him getting to bust windows to run the hose is literally their favorite thing to do. To the point where even if they don't actually need to, or it would be slower, they'll still do it. It's apparently a matter of principle.
I think apsurd interpreted Lammy’s post as a complaint, like the firefighters are too gleeful.
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.
Odd detail about the page, on the left it says "Audio feed courtesy of Orchestra" but the link goes to some dystopian panopticon kinda surveillance app.
I think they're being cheeky. I assume Orchestra is the dystopian company providing the "ShotSpotter" service to SF, and bop spotter is piggy backing on the api.
Amazing to see the scale of it. As a piece of feedback my assumption is that different officers are assigned to different areas and so since street sweeping is either the first and third or second and fourth week of the month for most residential areas, this will allow different officers to float to the top in different weeks. Having at least a 2 week lookback for the leaderboard is probably best. Otherwise great work!
> street sweeping is either the first and third or second and fourth week of the month for most residential areas
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.
I think the street is dirty precisely because there are vehicles out on the wrong day such that the street sweeper couldn't sweep that part of the street. Getting a ticket means the street sweeper couldn't do its job and you don't see clean streets.
As far as I know you only get a ticket if you're actually parked there when the sweeper comes by. There's a parking cop car following the sweeper and ticketing the cars. You're allowed to re-park in the street after the sweeper has done its job, even if it's still technically street sweeping time.
So if you've got a ticket, there almost certainly was a sweeper that came by at that time.
FWIW the sweeper comes by my street on the posted schedule. Most days one or two parking cops come ahead of the sweeper writing tickets. I have never seen them come behind the sweeper though I have seen the sweeper wait for them. I believe it is policy not to write tickets after because as other posts have noted it is perfectly legal to park right after the sweeper comes through even if it is still sweeper hours.
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.
Appears to have been given on 3 El Dorado South, San Francisco. The map marker shows a street called Avenida South San Francisco, Mexico, in front of a bar called El Dorado.
(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)
Officer 0336 is raking it in for the city. I wonder if there is a correlation with the areas which generate a lot of tickets and other city datasets. Perhaps crime rate or average household income?
You'll probably find a high correlation with the street cleaning dataset (if there is one). Nearly all of the tickets at the top of the leaderboard are street sweeping violations.
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.
"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.
It's is amusing that you question whether parking citations correlate with crime rates. The reason they give out tickets for this is that these people have parked unlawfully.
One, yes, the separate charge of civil tax fraud is not tax evasion and is not a crime.
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.
Yeah, that's my point. It's not a neutral point of view. Unlawfully operating cars is the most widespread and impactful behavior in SF, followed by wage theft, tax fraud, and tenant harassment. And all the other stuff that gets discussed as "crime" is in 4th place or lower.
> Unlawfully operating cars is the most widespread and impactful behavior in SF
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!)
You're not afraid to admit what's marketed as a fine or deterrent is simply a weirdly targeted tax but you're annoyed that it's sometimes avoidable due to only sporadic assessment of it.
IDK what plane this policy spectrum exists on but man is horseshoe theory clearly alive and well on it.
Officers are a limited resource, so their deployment matters. Are they assigned to areas that most benefit citizens, or those that most benefit the city? Is the focus on maximizing ticket revenue, or addressing the most dangerous violations, like blocked bike lanes? Are they primarily a revenue tool, a public safety measure, or just extra eyes on the street? Do wealthier neighborhoods receive more enforcement, effectively buying themselves safer streets? Basically I'm wondering does parking enforcement benefit SF residents uniformly?
Different neighborhoods may want different types/amount of enforcement as well. Some neighborhoods may have tiny driveways and are happy that a lot of cars can get away with parking "illegally" due to non-enforcement and put up with the resulting narrow paths where one car has to pull aside to let another car past. Other neighborhoods might have almost no cars ever parked on the street and people get angry if anyone parks in front of "their" curb, even though it's a public street and anyone can "legally" park there.
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.
Well, if you look at this data, virtually all of the tickets are for leaving your car in a street sweeping zone at the wrong time. So they are functioning as adjuncts of the street sweeping regime. Then you should think about this history of street sweeping in San Francisco. I think you might find that it is the opposite of your preconception. The wealthiest neighborhoods got rid of street sweeping decades ago, specifically because they didn't want to have to move their cars so much.
Sometimes yes. I've also received tickets from parking enforcement for legal parking and good luck disputing that without getting into a lawsuit. I literally had a ticket issued at a timestamp of when I was on the other side of the city.
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.
You'd really be up shit creek if parking illegally were a crime because there are all sorts of protections afforded to those accused of crimes not afforded to those accused of parking violations.
FYI the ticketing time is showing incorrectly out of Pacific time, e.g. here in Eastern all recent activity shows as 3 hours ago. Not a big deal as almost all users would be in Pacific, but wanted to mention.
Probably a good time to tell people that SF operates a "Text Before Tow Program" where you can get a warning that you're about to get towed: https://www.sfmta.com/text-tow-program
> This service only applies to parking more than 72-hours, blocked driveway, construction, and temporary no-parking (special event or moving truck) zones. Peak-hour tow-away lanes, hazards, yellow or white zones and other violations are not included.
Still great though. That would have saved me $500 6 years ago.
Often it's unofficially the policy. For PT ticket fines in Melbourne, I've never heard of someone having a fine enforced for the first problem. It's pretty much always just a warning logged against you.
Where I'm from there's no concept of towing on any parking violations. No one has the right to touch your vehicle, and if the police is involved they'd just contact the owner. The police would only move a car if it's a danger to the public.
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.)
>> A tow truck will be dispatched in conjunction with the text message notification and could be there in as few as five minutes.
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.
Why should roads, walkways, and construction sites be blocked just to let someone have more time to avoid a ticket? I imagine the text goes out from SF's servers simultaneously with the tow truck summons. It's a fair shot for both.
I totally agree with you on that, but then why have this program at first place then?
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.
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.
In my early career NZ traffic cops used to walk around with a Bluetooth printer strapped to their belt, that would print the tickets.
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.
Seems that something's been broken. The normal way to look up ticket images manually at https://wmq.etimspayments.com/ no longer works, returning "Unauthorized" even after properly getting past the CAPTCHA.
It looks like this system applied security through obscurity, more or less, though.
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'd guess the top spots are just super wealthy people who figure that at their "hourly rate", paying for parking is basically more costly than just eating the tickets. Like if someone's time is worth $10k+/hour, the parking tickets are basically just premium parking fees that are still "cheaper" than spending even a minute dealing with payment... Let your assistant pay whatever tickets you get in the mail instead.
Good point. I wonder if it might be a bimodal distribution - peaks for the super poor and the super wealthy. Of course, there are more poor than wealthy, so maybe you'd need to look at the rate per capita for different income brackets.
Maybe but honestly your logic doesn’t really make any sense to me anyway. If my time is worth $10k/hr, why am I driving myself? That alone is a huge waste of money.
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.
Having the ticket price linked to their income would immediately make the game fair. If you earn 10k/h and you need to pay a 100k ticket you will be more careful.
This is the insight behind demand-driven parking fees. The super wealthy folks who can pay an infinite amount for the spot won't matter how much the spot costs, they'll just pay the fee.
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.
What's funny is secure IDs could have easily prevented this but, even if the city discovers it and wants to shut it down now, I'd bet actually fixing the system would be too costly (IDs tend to couple to everything).
Pretty simple fix: require more data to look up a citation, like the number, issue date and plate/VIN (this is how my city does it). Technically doesn't make the scraping impossible if you wanna try every permutation of a license plate, but makes it mostly infeasible.
Currently it just requires the sequential citation number [1], which is how the data is being scraped so easily.
Yes, things like street closures for construction, film shoots, or Neighborhood Night Outs would all need permits to obstruct traffic/close the street.
Fun fact: as a regular citizen you can apply for such a permit online. I did this when we were moving houses to ensure the entire block in front of our house would be clear of cars (or we could tow if required) to make it possible to get a moving truck in on the one-lane street where double-parking would block all access. I filled out the forms. A week or so later the city dropped signs on the sidewalk warning of the upcoming closure.
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.
How are you handling the auth token/captcha on the website? I'm not a legal expert, but my impression is that automated solving of captchas during a scrape carries higher risk. That said, amazing project!
It would be great to see more automatic payment and enforcement. It's great that buses can issue tickets for blocking bus lanes, but I would absolutely love for their to be more automatic enforcement of blocking bike lanes and meter violations.
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.
Is it illegal to block bike lanes in SF? I ask because it is not illegal to do so in California, according to the learner's permit test my daughter recently took.
If so, then the DMV test is (presumably) wrong. California Vehicle Code §21211 says it's generally illegal to block a bike lane:
"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."
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]
Note that 21209 does not say "otherwise permitted" but "permitted." One interpratation (perhaps what the DMV is using) is that, since curb parking is generally permitted, parking in a bike lane that abuts the curb would also be generally permitted.
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.
What was the double negative? You haven't included one in your telling of the question ("Which of these is not an illegal place to park:" with the correct answer being "in a bike lane." - that's just a single negative...)
The DMV is unfortunately wrong about this, with an invalid interpretation of CVC - the DMV handbook is NOT the law (it's a simplistic layman's interpretation), and is not a valid legal defense.
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.
Yeah, they ignore SF311 reports by policy. I've managed it by flagging down an amazingly helpful parking control officer that happened to be in the area, or else by calling and reporting an obstruction of traffic (not mentioning the bike lane) and then waiting until the PCO arrived and talking to them.
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).
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.
I don't think needing to pass on the right is a defense against driving on the sidewalk. I think it just implies that you cannot pass while they are picking up passengers.
Yeah I think the intention is to prevent someone who disembarked from the bus and are then crossing the street from getting mowed down by a car overtaking from the bus's left. It's similar to why you can't pass a school bus when it has its stop sign out.
You only love it because you have some perverted dream of 100% enforcement of whatever your rules are. In reality automated enforcement would cause an uproar and the rules would be changed to accommodate the status quo.
I would much, much rather have the rules changed to reflect what we actually want them to be than to have bad rules that we only tolerate because we don't enforce them.
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.
I believe you are being downvoted because your comment violates the guidelines ("Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously... Edit out swipes."); anyway, that's why I downvoted.
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?
That doesn't change the fact that the laws/rules/etc across all sorts of issues are all written half baked with the assumption that enforcers will be reasonable and all sorts of edge cases don't need to be supported.
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.
> think you’ll find this leads to infinite fine revenue and higher congestion in pretty much all cities
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.
offline now. It's a reasonable to expect that this information should not be available in real time to protect parking officers. It's already published daily, as mentioned in other comments.
Oh man this is so fun but I slightly hate it. It probably won’t help people avoid parking enforcement much but it could somewhat which sucks because I think parking enforcement is a very good thing.
More, I worry about the chance a deranged person uses it to track a specific SFMTA agent who gave them a ticket.
Let's say that some people are opposed to the city's enforcement of parking rules against them (people who don't want parking tickets for overstaying in a spot, nor for parking somewhere they aren't supposed to).
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?
Even if you charge $10/hr, or whatever the market rate would be for street parking spots, you still need an enforcement mechanism to prevent people overstaying.
In general, the idea of a "market rate" for any given property depends fundamentally on a system of property rights actually being enforced.
Market rate is $4.10 per hour during peak hours. But it falls off precipitously per hour and ceases to be enforced around 6pm. For overstays those little white golf cart trucks have cameras that check license plates for permits. I recently got a parking permit for $200 or so after paying like $500 in tickets for various infractions including “Parking on Grades, wheels straight”. So I very much want anyone overstaying a 2hr parking spot to get tickets and or towed to make room. And I can speak from experience having just recently being towed, that the parking downtown is ruthlessly enforced. It will cost you about $700 if you’re towed.
I've always wondered what the market rate for parking would be if you allowed for things other than parking like restaurant tables, a shed, a tiny skyscraper...
San Francisco has a system for reporting parking violations. Residents can report illegal parking such as blocked driveways, sidewalk obstructions, double parking, and abandoned vehicles through the city’s SF311 platform.
You can make a report on the 311 website, mobile app, or by calling 311. You receive a tracking number to monitor the response.
Opposition must come through legal means, because the cheapness and omnipresence of enforcement is only getting better, especially for SFPD on the tech front.
Who used big data first, who uses big data more, who has more big data to work with, who has big data they get to keep to themselves and who has to work with only big data that both have the same access to?
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
Not sure if there are any tax savings to be had. Even the 100th place on the leaderboard netted $2k in a half day of working, so I think every single one of them may provide positive income for the city.
If you do not believe that is already true on multiple axes, you are probably mistaken. The combination of automated license plate scanners, phone beacon data, and behavioral metrics make that relatively straightforward to get, in aggregate.
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.
Google maps is free to use so obviously I'm the product Google sells. I'd say I'm getting a fair deal letting "them" track my location. (Why does nobody ever complain about them insisting on gender neutral pronouns? They must be very powerful.)
I've thought about building something that uses CV to detect parking cops near me, but this is even better! Now just add a paid feature to send alerts when there is a cop within a certain radius of you ;)
Incredible work. I'm disappointed to see so many of the leaderboard items are street cleaning tickets.
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.
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.
Yep! Market rate for private parking, and offering subsidized short-term commercial parking (which generally has broader societal benefit than private parking) with appropriate safeguards for abuse would be great!
Agreed, and it provides important revenue for transportation projects and helps keep our streets clean so I wouldn't want SFMTA to adjust that focus as-is.
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.
Where should the delivery trucks park if there is no infrastructure for them and the public has an ever increasing appetite for delivered products? Try to think about it from the delivery drivers point of view and their safety. The roads are not any one users exclusive resource. We all pay for them and they must be shared.
One 5 minute delivery spot is as good as many regular parking spots since it won't be taken up by long term parkers. You could probably eliminate 90% of parking spots and turn the other 10% to 5 minute spots and it would be easier for delivery drivers than the status qou
I agree. And on top of that it would be great to have spots with ALPRs that delivery companies can pay for their use and discourage or tow non-compliant vehicles.
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).
In commercial loading zones! We've allocated the color yellow for this in SF.
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.
I can't speak for SF I'm in Seattle. I don't think it is incumbent on delivery drivers to do activism for their employers. That's my opinion. And I still don't understand why people don't see that the delivery driver on foot is a vulnerable user of the roads and sidewalks. We aren't perfect but we are there for the public not because we like it.
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.
UPS drivers don't need to write their congressperson. UPS the company can just get their lobbyists to pressure city officials to convert more street parking spaces to commercial only spaces.
Bike lanes reduce the number of cars on the road and therefore make it easier for vehicles that are actually necessary (delivery, work, emergency, etc) to travel and park, not harder. So do all viable alternatives to driving. That in 2025 people still unironically say "just one more lane bro, and we'll solve traffic" is almost unbelievable.
Delivery vehicles reduce the number of cars on the road and therefore make it easier for bicycles to negotiate the roads. One delivery vehicle can easily replace dozens of car trips.
Ok. I understand bike lanes. I didn't say anything about more lanes, bro. I am talking about delivery vehicles and the challenges they face in urban environments. Keep in mind that a delivery driver can spend as much time on foot as they do in their vehicle. This means interacting with vehicles and bikes as a laden pedestrian. They are compromised and it can be dangerous.
I did a fascinating analysis of SFMTA data a few years back. They posted a public list of names and license plates [1] that they refuse to take down, despite many emails from me over the years. I found a particular license plate that belonged to a plumber with an impeccable 5 star reputation on Yelp, whose business in SF was effectively ended by street sweeping fines. He accidentally paid the same ticket twice, which resulted in his work vehicle being towed for excessive delinquency on the original ticket, which culminated in him moving his plumbing business to Utah.
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.
I'm curious, how did his name being on this list significantly affect his business?
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.
I should have clarified - I only found his business through that list because I noticed his vanity license plate HPPYPPS, which corresponded to a business named Happy Pipes Plumbing which I subsequently found on Yelp.
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.
Thanks for clarifying! So basically his van kept getting towed and he kept losing business as a result? Presumably it also cost him to recover his vehicle. So in summary, if you got on this list you're just permanently screwed in SF? And you can get on this list by paying a fine twice by accident?
> "?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.
More likely is he paid a ticket incorrectly. Someone said he paid the same ticket twice instead of paying each ticket once. Then the city racked up delinquency fines while making little to no effort to inform him of these fines or the outstanding ticket. One day, he gets towed and can't get his van back until thousands of dollars in fines and penalties are paid from a ticket that he thought had been taken care of long ago.
I don't understand or this makes no sense. If he paid the ticket twice, shouldn't SFTMA own him money? Why was it delinquent if he paid twice? Something does not add up in this story.
Just to confirm, this is what happened - he paid one twice, and therefore the other became delinquent. However, if you file a FOIA request with the SFMTA and do some basic analysis on how much is "owed per license plate", you will see that certain license plates have been allowed to accrue tens of thousands of dollars in parking fines with virtually no towing repercussions, going back as far as data is available (2013). Around 80-90% of these vehicles are rental cars, around 5-8% of them are commercial trucking companies which absorb the cost of 2 tickets per day, and this tiny 1% of license plates are effectively "lawless parkers" who drive high-end cars and accrue tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid parking fines every year.
Generally to keep streets safe to drive on, and pleasant to live near.
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 have a video from a street I used to live on that might illustrate what happens in between cleanings (you'll have to turn the camera view down to face the curb to see): https://youtu.be/ew4fMB7OIyo?t=8
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
> Why the hell does SF need to sweep the streets so much?
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.
Part of me says, “What a clever hack! Can I get a notification feature wrt where I parked?”
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”
No - you would have to file a FOIA request with the SFMTA, and then tabulate the "Total Paid" column in the response files. Below is my FOIA request template for the SFMTA [1] to assist anyone who is interested in doing this.
> 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
Where I live, many people park at intersections right up to the curb making it almost impossible to see oncoming traffic from the right or left. Really scary when you have a 16-year old driver you're trying to keep safe.
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.
Great solution but until then I think the gp's point still stands.
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.
Yes, I've seen some of this. While it certainly helps, it seems like a waste of limited resources. Why can't some people just follow such a simple rule?
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.
A car could push into the first third of it, but visibility would be fine in that case. Trying to use the whole thing in a car would mean you're jutting into the traffic lane, and anyone willing to do that is causing bigger problems. And if a bike parks in the stripes that's fine for visibility too.
It makes sense. It was ridiculous that they were originally proposing ticketing people without there being signage that it was illegal to park there. They need to just paint the curbs.
Is it ridiculous to ticket someone who parks in the middle of Market St if there's no sign that it's illegal?
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.
In some ways, yes, though not in many cities like SF, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, etc.
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)
> 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
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
Imagine you and your spouse both work full time, and you have 1-2 children. And your definition of 'living well' includes having those children learn to swim well, and do some sort of after-school sport, and also do math supplementation because SFUSD teaches math at a really slow pace.
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.)
There are also international tourists who may have different local parking rules than the ones in SF. Having clear demarcations between allowed and non allowed parking areas makes it easier for everyone to follow the correct rules.
Do you have an rss feed of road rules piped into Anki cards or what?
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.
No, I don't; there are plenty of places you can't legally park that do not have painted curbs or "No Parking" signage. Do we also need curbs and signage near every fire hydrant? How about every driveway? Can drivers double-park anywhere they want? Should they yield to pedestrians in crosswalks? Etc. etc.
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.
Portland does the same thing since most blocks in the older parts of town are 200 feet. Reserving 20 feet at either end would take away a huge chunk of street parking in residential areas built before driveways were common.
It's also why our light rail trains can only be two cars long.
Yes, it is illegal in Washington state and yet, people do it.
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.
Great implementation but reading the comments I wonder if there is really no sense of the streets as a commons you should use responsibly at all in the US.
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?
Nope, same in Toronto. Same everywhere I've been. Drivers all mentally turn into teenagers when it comes to anything to do with driving/parking. I'm very pro traffic and parking enforcement.
I agree with the sentiment but I want to point out that a car is not essential for most people living in SF, although many people outside the city think this. Around 35% of households don’t have a car: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
Very little of that anywhere in the country, especially when it's the rights of drivers vs other road users. San Francisco is a bit better but gets bad when it goes through its boom cycles that bring lots of people in.
(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.
Believe it or not, parking reformists tend to agree! The fact we even have a parking "fine" indicates that it isn't really priced right; if you park somewhere you should just pay the market rate for doing so, whether it's for 30 minutes or 30 days.
The legendary Donald Shoup (who sadly died this year) https://www.shoupdogg.com/ - writes about this in The High Cost of Free Parking
> (b) Parking signs are too goddamn hard to parse, that's the real problem.
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.
Every time I drive in SF, I pay for parking, and then get a parking 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.
Others have already pointed out some of the obvious issues with your reasoning, but I'd like to add that improving bike and pedestrian infrastructure can actually make it easier for motorists by reducing the number of vehicles on the road and by easing congestion through traffic calming. You can actually end up with more parking spaces because while some parking spaces may be lost by adding bike paths (which is not a given!) it's entirely possible this is offset by a reduced number of cars on the road.
Also, in places with good bike infrastructure it's normal to see food delivery drivers riding bikes instead of driving cars.
SF has dedicated commercial loading zones, for large deliveries. (Or, for some of the larger buildings, they just have an underground or partially underground loading dock.) For things like Uber, yes, one would need to find a parking spot, not park in an active lane of traffic¹. If either are insufficient, people are free to lobby for more, where they are needed.
(¹and as bike lanes are not wide enough to accommodate a vehicle, you're partially blocking a car lane, too.)
Your last point is one of the most frustrating things with unprotected bike lanes - drivers will endanger bicyclists for no real gain when they park in the bike lane because the car lane is also still blocked! Somehow they prefer to block 2 active travel lanes instead of just one.
I mean... I ordered dinner last night after getting into SF around 2am. Not only did I meet the Dasher in my hotel's lobby, when I saw the direction he was coming from on the app, I went outside, across the street, and over to the alley he was coming down then held my phone up so he could see me.
I don't live here, but I can see parking is a huge hassle. Why make the poor guy circle the block until the hotel's portico had an opening for him to park when I could just walk like 50', get my food faster, and save him 5-10 minutes?
Unfamiliar with SF? Uber Eats drivers don't "find parking". They drive two wheeler electric bicycles and scooters with a big box on the back. When they 'park' they stop their vehicle on the sidewalk.
I mean, I get your point that you can make rules that make other things costly. It's just that the SF adaptation doesn't have the characteristics that you describe so it's some kind of personal political erotica. What actually happens is:
> Dreams of a utopia with bike lanes everywhere and drivers ticketed left and right
> Delivery drivers double park their trucks and tickets are cost of business
> UberEats and DoorDash are delivered by electric bike with HMP logo on front
Safeway? Sure. Mom-and-Pops? Not usually. How are small restaurants going to get their ingredients delivered if delivery trucks can’t park? Ok maybe in some locations they can park a few blocks away and deliver with hand trucks —but then they risk taking much more time to deliver and going back to a broken-in truck or van.
> How are small restaurants going to get their ingredients delivered if delivery trucks can’t park?
The only city where this is a problem is New York, because we don’t have alleys in our densest neighbourhoods. And in New York, our solution is for folks to park illegally and the meter maids to print tickets which are treated as a business expense.
In San Francisco, park in an alley, deliver at night, or park away from the site and use a scooter or whatnot to make the last mile. (Or eat the ticket.)
> And in New York, our solution is for folks to park illegally, the meter maids to print tickets which are treated as a business expense.
Its a sad game that has to be played. Used to have a family business and a good chunk of our business was in Manhattan. The fucking parking games were insane and it got to the point where we gave up and started charging a Manhattan fee that was the cost of a parking ticket. Another issue was dealing with cops directly chasing you when double parked which was unfortunately another commonly needed tactic. Even UPS and FedEx play the game. You see a driver got out, load up a cart with a few dozen boxes and head down the street all while a traffic cop is writing up a ticket. It's such a bozo city sometimes.
It’s a weird little ecosystem. If tickets were made more expensive, parking in lots and having smaller vehicles (probably bikes) fan out would make sense. If they were cheaper, you wouldn’t have all the meter maids.
As a former Manhattan resident, I have to say, this was never a point of frustration. The illegally parked trucks tended to make quick stops on two-lane roads. Contrast that with getting stuck behind a fucking garbage truck going cross town…
I'd prefer people delivering my goods and handling my food park illegally in a bike lane and use a restroom like a civilized person rather than being forced to go in a Gatorade bottle before handing me my sandwich.
> Maybe he had to use the restroom in an emergency?
So the premise is made up.
> I'd prefer people delivering my goods and handling my food park illegally in a bike lane and use a restroom like a civilized person rather than being forced to go in a Gatorade bottle
Sure. And they get a ticket. This is a feeble argument.
Huh - I don't know if I like those data being available in that format. I feel like they could probably split it up so specific plates aren't available to the public alongside the lat/long.
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.
> 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 said wasn't valid rather than 984,946,605 given initially (and shown in the image).
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
So wait.
cop-spotter is brought to you by the people who brought you bop-spotter?
Shotspotter not related co.
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.
https://imgur.com/a/u4hg8DS
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.
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)
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...
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.
(Just a random hypothetical thought, I'm not saying that is the case or their motivation, only that it theoretically could be)
No.
“In the United States, tax evasion constitutes a crime” [1].
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tax_evasion
Moreover: https://www.irs.gov/irm/part25/irm_25-001-006
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!)
IDK what plane this policy spectrum exists on but man is horseshoe theory clearly alive and well on it.
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.
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.
Great work though, this is rad.
Still great though. That would have saved me $500 6 years ago.
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.)
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'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.
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.
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.
That was fast! I missed it.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs
If you're a registered apple developer you get like 250k requests/day for free
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.
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.
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
“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.
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.
"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]
It is however usually unwise/dickish to do so. Hence why it is in the test that way.
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.
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.
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).
e.g.
- Do you call 311 or a different number?
- How soon have you had someone arrive at the scene?
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.
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....
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?
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?
No illegally parked vehicles?
The negative externalities of illegally parked vehicles charged to the source?
I'll dream of that.
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.
More, I worry about the chance a deranged person uses it to track a specific SFMTA agent who gave them a ticket.
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.
https://www.sf.gov/departments--311-customer-service-center
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/
Then they could see where they're under-patrolling and adjust their routes to fill in the gaps.
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...
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.
> "?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. :)
Incurring higher costs than revenue is a common cause of business failures.
Oh well.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fBoqMMPoU9k
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.
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”
> 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
1. https://www.sfmta.com/public-records-requests
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_extension
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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?
(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.
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.
Also, in places with good bike infrastructure it's normal to see food delivery drivers riding bikes instead of driving cars.
(¹and as bike lanes are not wide enough to accommodate a vehicle, you're partially blocking a car lane, too.)
I don't live here, but I can see parking is a huge hassle. Why make the poor guy circle the block until the hotel's portico had an opening for him to park when I could just walk like 50', get my food faster, and save him 5-10 minutes?
I mean, I get your point that you can make rules that make other things costly. It's just that the SF adaptation doesn't have the characteristics that you describe so it's some kind of personal political erotica. What actually happens is:
> Dreams of a utopia with bike lanes everywhere and drivers ticketed left and right
> Delivery drivers double park their trucks and tickets are cost of business
> UberEats and DoorDash are delivered by electric bike with HMP logo on front
uh don't big shops usually have truck ports?
The only city where this is a problem is New York, because we don’t have alleys in our densest neighbourhoods. And in New York, our solution is for folks to park illegally and the meter maids to print tickets which are treated as a business expense.
In San Francisco, park in an alley, deliver at night, or park away from the site and use a scooter or whatnot to make the last mile. (Or eat the ticket.)
Its a sad game that has to be played. Used to have a family business and a good chunk of our business was in Manhattan. The fucking parking games were insane and it got to the point where we gave up and started charging a Manhattan fee that was the cost of a parking ticket. Another issue was dealing with cops directly chasing you when double parked which was unfortunately another commonly needed tactic. Even UPS and FedEx play the game. You see a driver got out, load up a cart with a few dozen boxes and head down the street all while a traffic cop is writing up a ticket. It's such a bozo city sometimes.
It’s a weird little ecosystem. If tickets were made more expensive, parking in lots and having smaller vehicles (probably bikes) fan out would make sense. If they were cheaper, you wouldn’t have all the meter maids.
As a former Manhattan resident, I have to say, this was never a point of frustration. The illegally parked trucks tended to make quick stops on two-lane roads. Contrast that with getting stuck behind a fucking garbage truck going cross town…
I'd prefer people delivering my goods and handling my food park illegally in a bike lane and use a restroom like a civilized person rather than being forced to go in a Gatorade bottle before handing me my sandwich.
What shelves are empty? Touch grass.
So the premise is made up.
> I'd prefer people delivering my goods and handling my food park illegally in a bike lane and use a restroom like a civilized person rather than being forced to go in a Gatorade bottle
Sure. And they get a ticket. This is a feeble argument.
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.
https://walzr.com/HDR2.jpg