He suspected this absurd-seeming pattern was due to limitations baked into the software used by parking control officers. Whatever its reason for existing, the pattern of sequential ticket IDs, paired with parking officers likely claiming batches of ticket numbers, meant Walz was able to track their routes by plotting each parking ticket on a map as soon as it was entered into the system. A car owner could look at the activity of the officers currently out on patrol and see if any of them were slowly descending on their neighborhood.
Last year, parking officials in San Francisco issued over a million tickets[1] within city limits, which amounted to over $100 million in fines for car owners. “I actually don’t have a car, but I have plenty of friends that talk about it,” says Walz. Like most costs in San Francisco, these tickets can quickly add up. For example, forgetting to move your car during the weekly street sweeping—an error my household has made more than once—will cost you $90 every time.
Dude, Where’s My Parking Cop?
The website’s live updates were pulled from the city government’s website and visualized on an Apple Map. Find My Parking Cops tracked the routes of individual parking control officers, giving them each unique visual identifiers, as well as their cadence of tickets.
On Tuesday, for example, the site displayed one officer seemingly starting their shift around 10:30 am and handing out 35 tickets over the next few hours as they patrolled a neighborhood in Lower Pacific Heights. The citations logged were primarily for expired meters, which costs $107 per ticket, and not having a residential permit, which costs $108 per ticket. In total, the fines racked up by that one officer over a few hours amounted to almost $4,000.
Who’s handing out the most tickets each week? Walz included a leaderboard on the website that ranked just how much in fines each officer handed out. While officers were only identified on the map by a number and their initials, their cumulative ticket cost was tracked. When WIRED was last able to check Walz’s website on Tuesday, the top fine giver had issued 157 tickets so far, handing out over $16,000 in fees for violations.
Prior to Find My Parking Cops, Walz created another San Francisco–specific website. This one used a phone, placed on a street corner in the Mission District, to identify what songs people were listening to in public. He then uploaded a live feed of the songs, captured and identified through the Shazam app, onto the Bop Spotter website[2]. It provided a little peek into what neighborhood residents were bumping at the time while also slyly nodding at the abundance of surveillance in the city. He’s also previously built a site, called IMG_0001,[3] to surface old YouTube[4] clips uploaded by everyday people in the platform’s early days. Those grainy, private videos stand in stark contrast to the stuff that dominates the platform today.
The parking ticket tracker was another side project for Walz. “I worked in my free time on the weekends the last few weeks to make it happen,” he says.
While Walz’s websites sometimes come with a dose of social commentary, he didn’t envision this project as making some kind of grand, sweeping statement about parking tickets or what it means to drive in 2025. Rather, it’s another entry in his repertoire of cool websites powered by unique data sources.
“I’m not ‘pro’ parking cop. I’m not ‘anti’ parking cop,” says Walz. “It’s just data I was able to unearth, and I thought it would be cool to visualize it.”
And now it’s gone. Representatives for Apple[5] did not respond to immediate requests for comment. I reached out to Walz after the city’s data feed was cut off, but he didn’t pick up.
References
- ^ over a million tickets (sfstandard.com)
- ^ Bop Spotter website (sfstandard.com)
- ^ called IMG_0001, (www.wired.com)
- ^ YouTube (www.wired.com)
- ^ Apple (www.wired.com)