News article reporting that a San Francisco parking app was shut down by the city hours after launch, per the creator.
A viral app that helped San Franciscans avoid parking tickets has been killed by the city, its creator says. The app, which launched Tuesday, allows people to see the location of parking cops in close to real time. It even includes a leaderboard showing which officers made the city the most money that week: Officer 0336 racked up more than $15,000 before the app was rendered useless.After the app, dubbed “Find My Parking Cops,” was live for just four hours, the city changed its website so that parking citations are no longer publicly viewable. The app’s creator said later he’d found an alternate data source to keep it running, but on Wednesday morning, the app was functioning intermittently.The parking map Walz created allowed users to track the locations of San Francisco parking officers. | Source: Riley Walz“Ahhhhhh … the MTA just changed their site so I am no longer getting data!” the creator, Riley Walz, texted The Standard at 2:34 p.m. San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson Erica Kato said the city changed its site to protect parking cops.“Citations are a tool to ensure compliance with parking laws, which help keep our streets safe and use our limited curb space efficiently and fairly,” Kato said in an email. “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.”At 2:34 p.m., the city payment portal that allows people to view copies of their parking tickets no longer showed any, according to Walz. | Source: Garrett Leahy/The StandardWalz, who admits he’s not “pro or anti parking cop,” got the idea after seeing violation notices for graffiti tacked to the side of buildings. He saw that the notices had a complaint ID and that the way complaint numbers were assigned followed predictable patterns and were published online by the city. He wondered if the same was true with parking tickets and their ID numbers and, lo and behold