Viral parking ticket app lasts just 4 hours as city kills project
8 hours ago
- #San-Francisco
- #parking-enforcement
- #civic-tech
- A viral app called 'Find My Parking Cops' helped San Franciscans avoid parking tickets by tracking parking officers in real time.
- The app included a leaderboard showing which officers issued the most fines, with one officer racking up over $15,000 in a week.
- The city disabled public access to parking citation data within four hours of the app's launch, citing safety and job disruption concerns.
- The app's creator, Riley Walz, found an alternate data source but faced intermittent functionality as the city continued to block access.
- Walz plans to make the parking ticket data downloadable to help residents identify high-risk areas for parking violations.
- The app used web scraping to track ticket issuance in real time, revealing patterns like one officer issuing 63 tickets in Noe Valley in a single day.
- This isn't the first time San Francisco has targeted civic-minded apps, having previously threatened to shut down an API used by an AI-enabled 311 reporting app.