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”
If you're a registered apple developer you get like 250k requests/day for free
No.
“In the United States, tax evasion constitutes a crime” [1].
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.
IDK what plane this policy spectrum exists on but man is horseshoe theory clearly alive and well on it.
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.
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.
I wonder if street cleaning is net profitable for the city once you factor in tickets. That would make cutting the street cleaning frequency [1] a doubly bad idea.
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/18/san-francisco-city-hall-st...
(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
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.
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.
> $158
> 99 Grove St
> 10:43 AM • Truck
> Blocking bike lane
> Wonders why shelves are empty when delivery drivers can't park their trucks anywhere
> Angrily gives Uber Eats driver poor review because his tuna fish sandwich was 2 minutes late because driver couldn't find parking
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, 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.)
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.
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.
(¹and as bike lanes are not wide enough to accommodate a vehicle, you're partially blocking a car lane, too.)
Also, in places with good bike infrastructure it's normal to see food delivery drivers riding bikes instead of driving cars.
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?
Then they could see where they're under-patrolling and adjust their routes to fill in the gaps.
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.
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.
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'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).
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.
"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/
SF city code also lists it as a separate parking infraction: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...
No illegally parked vehicles?
The negative externalities of illegally parked vehicles charged to the source?
I'll dream of that.
How? Laffer curve will max out as behaviour adjusts. And that adjustment means folks parking legally or forgoing a car, not driving around in circles for fun.
Furthermore, your take is just asinine. 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 innundated 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.
SFMTA’s citation system is operated via a Conduent “CPMS / eTIMS / CitySight” contract and the agency’s RFP/contract explicitly requires a check-digit algorithm on the citation number field. (So a check digit is almost certainly part of the number format.)
https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
Further analysis here: https://chatgpt.com/share/68d2f0c2-f50c-800e-a992-504dbcfc56...
More, I worry about the chance a deranged person uses it to track a specific SFMTA agent who gave them a ticket.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Oh well.
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 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.
Incurring higher costs than revenue is a common cause of business failures.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So has Manhattan’s no right turn on red law. Still requires signage to have tickets stick. (And be polite.)
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.
From the limited dataset it looks the last digit comes from:
last digit = (<sum of previous the digits> + 2) mod 7
Great work though, this is rad.
So wait.
cop-spotter is brought to you by the people who brought you bop-spotter?
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.
supportengineer•1h ago
jacobolus•1h ago
sbarre•59m ago
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.