A web developer used city parking enforcement data to map the routes of parking enforcement officers.
A website titled “Find My Parking Cops” gave San Francisco residents the chance to track the city’s parking enforcement officers and stay one step ahead of parking tickets — at least, for one morning, until the public data feed was cut off.
According to reporting by Reece Rogers in Wired, the website was created by Riley Walz, a developer known for stunt 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.” Walz scraped citation number data to show a trail of tickets being issued in real time.
A few hours after the site went viral last Thursday morning, the data feed it used went dark. According to a statement from an SFMTA representative, “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.” The city issued over a million parking tickets last year, amounting to over $100 million in fines.
As for Walz, he says the project was not meant to make a statement. “It's just data I was able to unearth, and I thought it would be cool to visualize it.”
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