A 23-year-old software engineer in San Francisco, Riley Walz, has inadvertently exposed significant flaws in the city's parking enforcement system, leading to a scramble by municipal authorities. Walz launched an online map that tracked parking enforcement officers in real-time, a project that took advantage of publicly accessible, unauthenticated data. The city's transport agency responded in a matter of hours.
The "Find My Parking Cops" Map
Walz's service, aptly named Find My Parking Cops (accessible at walzr.com/sf-parking/), displayed a San Francisco map showing the geolocation of every parking inspector in the city in real-time. The interface was intentionally designed to mimic Apple's "Find My" app, showing each inspector’s initials and their last known location.
The municipal transport agency, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), reacted with unprecedented speed.
By noon on the day of the launch, the SFMTA had shut down access to the raw data. However, this was only a temporary fix; within hours, Walz found a workaround.
An Open Secret: The Sequential Fines
The most surprising part of this saga is that Walz didn't hack anything. He simply noticed that the SFMTA's fine payment website allowed anyone to retrieve a complete copy of any parking ticket - including the car's license plate number, the location of the violation, and even personal notes from the inspector like "Driver called me a jerk" - by entering the ticket number.
Since ticket numbers are issued sequentially (though not consecutively), Walz wrote a simple script that could predict the next fine numbers and parse the data in real-time.
The core problem was one of "security through obscurity" - the data was technically open to anyone, but no one had thought to compile it into a simple, viral visualization until now.
Revealing Inefficiencies and Revenue
The map wasn't just a tracking tool; it offered a fascinating, real-world glimpse into bureaucratic efficiency. It featured a ranking of the "most productive" cops. The week's leader, Officer #0435, had issued fines totaling $16,722 in just two days.
By contrast, officers at the bottom of the list generated about $3,000 - a fivefold difference in productivity that raises questions about employee motivation and enforcement standards.
Parking fines are big business in San Francisco. The average fine is around $105, though parking in an accessibility spot can cost up to $866. With approximately 300 inspectors operating in small, single-occupancy vehicles, the city issues a fine every 24 seconds.
Despite this staggering rate, an analysis by The San Francisco Standard calculated that at the current pace, the revenue generated would only close the SFMTA's $320 million budget deficit in 132 years.
The Bureaucratic Reaction
The SFMTA's response was swift, a pace municipal agencies usually only adopt when money is at stake. Their official statement was: "We welcome the creative use of technology to encourage compliance with parking rules, but we must protect the safety of our employees."
The unstated translation is clear: drivers were using the map to avoid enforcement, directly threatening the agency's quarterly performance metrics.
Also read:
- YouTube Rolls Out Collaboration Feature: A Boost for Small Creators and Cross-Promotion Magic
- Sora 2 Has Even MrBeast Sweating: The AI Takeover of Short-Form Content Is Here
- Men Masturbate More Often Than Women - And Science Says It Stays That Way with Age
Walz's Track Record of Viral Projects
Walz, who doesn't even own a car and was inspired to create the project after his neighbor got a ticket, has a history of creating engaging, simple projects that capture public attention:
- Bopspotter (last year) was a microphone on Mission Street that logged songs playing in the street.
- Papers was an archive of newspaper front pages.
- Routeshuffle generates random running routes.
Walz didn't "expose" a sophisticated secret; he simply pointed out that the system was fundamentally leaky. By turning easily available, disorganized data into a viral, user-friendly visualization - especially data about enforcement officers - he showed that the biggest security hole wasn't a malicious hacker, but a lack of foresight in data access and security by the city itself.
