Wikimedia CommonsA viral San Francisco app that tracked parking enforcement officers in real time was shut down by the city just four hours after launch.
The tool, called ‘Find My Parking Cops’ (a play on Find My Friends), was created by Riley Walz and allowed users to see where citations were being issued in near real-time. It even displayed a leaderboard of officers ranked by how much fine money they collected, with one officer tallying more than $15,000 before the app stopped working.
The project scraped data from the city’s payment portal by predicting parking ticket ID numbers and mapping where violations were logged. This allowed San Franciscans to watch tickets being written almost as they happened.
Walz shared that the map revealed patterns, including one officer issuing 12 tickets at a single downtown curb within two hours, while another handed out more than 60 tickets in Noe Valley the same day.
App shut down quickly
But within four hours of the app going live, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency had changed its website to block access. “Ahhhhhh … the MTA just changed their site, so I am no longer getting data!” Walz told The San Francisco Standard.
SFMTA spokesperson Erica Kato said the decision was made to protect workers. “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,” Kato told the same newspaper.
“We welcome creative uses of technology to encourage legal parking, but we also want to make sure that our employees are able to do their jobs safely, and without disruption.”
However, according to Walz, the site was back up and running as of 10pm local time, although for how long is anyone’s guess.
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Walz, who previously helped create a viral fake New York City steakhouse, said the parking app was both a utility and a dataset that could fuel future projects. He plans to release the raw information as a spreadsheet so residents can analyze where they are most likely to be ticketed.