SFMTA scrambles to shut down viral parking ticket tracker

It had all the makings of a viral X post, and viral it did go, with over 8 million views in under 24 hours. The message was straightforward: “I reverse engineered the San Francisco parking ticket system. I can see every ticket seconds after it’s written.” Underneath it was a familiar image for any iPhone user — an Apple map of the city dotted with gray, initialed bubbles, and an explanation: “So I made a website. Find My Friends?”

No.

“AVOID THE PARKING COPS.”

The anarchy, however, was short-lived. After two brief blips of life, as of this morning, the website is down again.

The creator of the site, Riley Walz, does not have a car, but does have a clear penchant for internet trolling. Some of his previous projects include producing a fake NYC restaurant, as well as a song-identifying, playlist-making Bop Spotter on Mission Street. During a phone call with SFGATE, Walz said he got the idea for the citation tracker after some friends were talking about getting ticketed. The conversation made him wonder whether there was a predictable pattern to the ticket IDs — his hunch was correct.

It took Walz a “couple weekends on the side” to cobble together the site, which was able to scrape tickets seconds after they were written and display them in a live map.

The map revealed an impressive amount of information: the make, color and location of the car, and the reason for the ticket. The vast majority of the citations doled out Tuesday morning were street cleaning violations, but outliers like “too far from curb,” “hill parking,” and “missing plate” were also recorded. The site also displayed the initials of the officer who wrote the ticket, their enforcement route and a leaderboard — the top ticketer issued 63 in under 7 hours, resulting in $6,617 in fines.

Given the potential lost revenue at stake, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency caught on like the rest of the internet, and by Tuesday afternoon, the site had been quickly rendered obsolete. Undeterred, Walz restored the site again after 10 p.m., though this, too, didn’t last. By his estimation, it was only active for a few more hours.

“We made sure that all access to citation data was via authorized routes,” said Erica Kato, a spokesperson for SFMTA, in an email to SFGATE. “But when our staff’s safety, and personal information of people who have received parking citations, is at risk, we must act on that swiftly.”

Yet the saga wasn’t over. By Wednesday, the official SFMTA ticket payment site was also down, citing “maintenance.” “I’m curious what was going on there,” said Walz over the phone. “If it is even because of me.” As of Wednesday afternoon, that site is functional and the chaos seems over for now.

According to SFMTA, there is no need for a site like Walz’s.  

“The official way to access our parking citation data is via our public website on DataSF,” Kato said. “Anyone is still able to see [the] type of citation, date of issuance and data that can be mapped and analyzed on DataSF daily.”