The curb in San Francisco is a battlefield. If you live there, you know the sound of the little three-wheeled interceptor vehicles. They hum. They idle. Then, the “scritch-scratch” of a thermal printer happens, and you’re out eighty bucks. Maybe a hundred. It’s a constant, low-stakes anxiety that defines city life.
On a random Tuesday, things changed. For a few hours, the hunters became the hunted.
Riley Walz, a guy who builds weird websites for fun, launched a project called “Find My Parking Cops.” It did exactly what the name suggests. It mapped every parking control officer (PCO) in San Francisco in real time. If an officer wrote a ticket in North Beach, a dot appeared on the map. If they moved toward Russian Hill, the trail followed. It was a digital early warning system for the over-taxed and the forgetful.
Then, just as quickly as it went viral, it died. The city plugged the hole.
The Code Behind the Ticket
Walz isn’t a parking activist. He’s a software engineer. From what I can tell, he just likes poking at data to see what falls out. The inspiration didn’t come from a grand manifesto. It came from a roommate getting a ticket.
Most people look at a parking citation and see a bill. Walz looked at the nine-digit citation number and saw a pattern. He realized the numbers weren’t random. They were sequential, but with a weird, glitchy logic. To get the next ticket number, you usually add 11. But if the last digit is a 6, you add 4. This means no ticket in San Francisco ever ends in a 7, 8, or 9.
It’s the kind of clunky math you only find in ancient government software.
By “scraping” these numbers – basically having a script check the city’s public database for the next ticket in the sequence—Walz could see tickets the moment they were issued. Since every ticket has a location attached, he had a live GPS feed of every PCO on duty.
Like Apple, But for Avoiding Fines
The interface was a cheekily designed clone of Apple’s “Find My” app. Instead of tracking your AirPods or your sister, you were tracking badge numbers. Each officer had a little icon. You could watch them zip through Lower Pacific Heights. You could see them hovering in the Mission.
The data was brutal.
One officer started their shift at 10:30 AM. By lunchtime, they had cleared 35 tickets. Most were for expired meters ($107) or missing residential permits ($108). In a single morning, that one person generated nearly $4,000 for the city coffers. San Francisco clears over $100 million a year from these fines. It’s a massive, efficient machine. Walz just gave that machine a face.
He even added a leaderboard. Because why not?
The “Top Fine Giver” on Tuesday had issued 157 tickets by the time the site was looked at by reporters. That’s $16,000 in fees from one human being in a vest. It’s impressive, in a terrifying sort of way.
The Empire Strikes Back (Fast)
Government agencies are usually slow. They take months to fix a pothole. They take years to approve a housing permit. But if you mess with the revenue stream? They move like Olympic sprinters.
“Find My Parking Cops” went live on Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, the data feed was dead.
The SFMTA (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency) didn’t just ignore it. They actively changed the way their website handles ticket data to block Walz’s scraper. It was “lightning speed,” according to Walz. Usually, tech guys talk about “disrupting” things, but this was a rare case where the bureaucracy disrupted the disruptor.
The city put out a statement later. They talked about “compliance” and “safety.” They said they want their employees to work “without disruption.”
Anyway, it’s pretty clear they just didn’t want people dodging the $90 street-sweeping tax.
The Man Who Watches the City
This isn’t the first time Riley Walz has done something like this. He’s the same person who created “Bop Spotter.” For that project, he hid a phone with the Shazam app on a pole in the Mission district. It recorded every song playing in passing cars and posted them to a live site.
He also built “IMG_0001,” which is a site that finds the very first, unedited videos uploaded to YouTube. These projects aren’t usually about making money. They’re about surveillance—specifically, how much data we’re all leaving behind without realizing it.
“I’m not ‘pro’ parking cop. I’m not ‘anti’ parking cop,” Walz said. He just thinks the data is “cool to visualize.” It’s a very coder way of looking at the world. Everything is just a stream of numbers until someone puts it on a map.
Why We Care So Much
The reason this site blew up on social media wasn’t just because people hate tickets. It’s because San Francisco is an incredibly expensive place to exist.
If you forget to move your car for street cleaning, that’s $90. If you’re two minutes late to a meter, that’s $107. For a lot of people, two or three tickets in a month is the difference between making rent and falling behind. There’s a feeling that the city is waiting for you to fail.
Having a map that showed where the “threat” was felt like a tiny bit of powerbeing handed back to the citizens. It turned the stressful experience of parking into a game of hide-and-seek where you could finally see the “seeker.”
The Aftermath
As of right now, if you go to the website, you’ll just see a message saying the data is gone. The map is empty. The PCOs are back to being ghosts in the machine.
It’s a reminder that “public data” is only public as long as it isn’t too useful. The moment someone turns raw information into a tool that actually helps people circumvent a system, the gates get slammed shut.
Walz didn’t pick up his phone when people tried to call him after the shutdown. He’s probably already working on the next weird thing.
For one morning, though, the drivers of San Francisco had an edge. They could see the tiny cars coming. They could move their Honda Civics before the thermal printer started its “scritch-scratch” song. It was a short-lived victory, but in a city where a parking spot can cost more than a meal, it was a glorious one.
The PCOs are still out there, though. They’re patrolling the Richmond and the Sunset right now. And they’re definitely still adding 11 to the citation numbers. You just won’t be able to see them coming anymore.
