# San Francisco Shuts Down Parking Cop Tracker Within Hours Of Release

In a shocking turn of events, a website designed to track San Francisco's notoriously unforgiving traffic cops in real time was shut down just four hours after it started. The website, which has been dubbed "Find My Parking Cop" due to its similarity to Apple's Find My Friends app, was quickly taken offline by the city citing officer safety as the reason.

The website was created by software developer Riley Walz, who noticed that his roommate's parking tickets were being issued in a seemingly random pattern. Intrigued, Walz set out to uncover the algorithm used by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) to automatically issue citation numbers. After some digging, he discovered that the agency's parking citation data was publicly accessible and could be scraped using specific programming techniques.

The website allowed users to view the locations of SFMTA parking enforcement officers in near real-time, based on the location of the last ticket each officer wrote. This information enabled users to return to their cars to feed the meter before getting a ticket, effectively avoiding parking fines. The site also provided a second tab displaying exactly how many tickets and how much revenue each officer was responsible for collecting that week.

While the site can no longer collect fresh data, previously scraped information is still available. It's estimated that each of SFMTA's parking cops collected thousands of dollars in revenue, with some officers exceeding $10,000 and one particularly successful officer raking in $20,150 with 192 tickets. The website also provided a unique insight into the city's notoriously aggressive parking enforcement policies.

The sudden shutdown of the website has raised questions about the motivations behind the City of San Francisco's actions. While the agency claims that officer safety was the primary concern, many are left wondering if there were other factors at play. As one user noted on social media, "It's good that the state government banned San Francisco's previous practice of towing cars for parking tickets, but it seems like all good things must come to a rapid end."

Walz, who has never had a parking ticket and doesn't even own a car, was left disappointed by the website's swift demise. He explained on his website that he had briefly attempted to find alternative ways to obtain the data to keep the site up, but eventually gave up the cat-and-mouse game.

The SFMTA provided a statement to The San Francisco Standard and Wired, explaining that citations are used to ensure compliance with parking laws, which help keep streets safe and use limited curb space efficiently and fairly. While they welcomed "creative uses of technology" to encourage legal parking, they also emphasized the need for officer safety and disruption-free operations.

Despite its brief lifespan, the website has left a lasting impact on the city's residents. As one user noted, "This was not a hack or data breach; the information Walz accessed was publicly accessible, and it appears that he violated no laws in doing so." The incident serves as a reminder of the complex relationships between technology, law enforcement, and civic engagement.

The website remains up, but is now functional only for its original purpose – to display a message indicating that data cannot be obtained. As one user noted on social media, "In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live. I can't get data from it anymore."