Car owners in San Francisco fed up with parking tickets had a brief moment of respite on Tuesday thanks to a website called Find My Parking Cops. The site kept tabs on where city workers were issuing tickets, showing the locations of parking control officers on a city map in real time.
I’m using the past tense to tell you about it because shortly after the site went live, the real-time data feed powering it went dark.
Before that sad turn of events, and while the buzz around the site was still high, I spoke to the creator, Riley Walz, about how he put it together. Walz is a software engineer known for building stunty websites. He got the idea for this one after looking at all of the information listed on the parking tickets issued by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Each ticket shows the make of the car, the license number, and so on. But right at the top is the ticket’s citation number.
“I figured out that the ticket numbers are predictable,” Walz says, “which means I can efficiently scrape them.”
Walz’s website looked quite similar to Apple’s Find My feature, a tool sometimes used by iOS owners to track the location of family and friends. But rather than people you know IRL, this site showed the trail of tickets issued by parking enforcers as they zipped around San Francisco in their tiny single-seaters.
The website quickly went viral on social media Tuesday, the same day as its initial release. It enjoyed a few good hours, before the site’s functionality vanished: City officials appear to have cut off the sources of data that Walz was using to track parking enforcement.
“In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live,” reads an announcement Walz added to Find My Parking Cops on Tuesday afternoon. “I can’t get data from it anymore.”
“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,” an SFMTA representative said in an emailed statement on Tuesday afternoon, after Walz’s site was no longer functional. “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.”
Ticket Master
The idea for Find My Parking Cops was first sparked when Walz’s roommate got a parking fine. Walz noticed the nine-digit identification number on the ticket and started looking for patterns. By using publicly available information, he believed he cracked the code.
“It seems each possible ticket number follows a pattern: add 11, except add 4 if the last digit is 6. So, no ticket can end in 7, 8, or 9,” Walz wrote in a blog post explaining the site. “So, the ticket after 984,946,606 is actually 984,946,610, and after that is 984,946,621.”