Find SF parking cops

There is a world difference between everything you mentioned, and publishing the real time locations of officers by their actual name (initials) on a website anybody can visit.

So live public webcams in the employee restrooms in all government buildings?

I would argue that public officers would retain personal privacy, but that such privacy cannot be a shield against the public for the government concealing substantive operations, and that the identity of public officers and the substantive means by which they are engaged in the exercise of public functions, are therefore not within the space of their personal privacy.

But the idea that current public locations of identifiable public officers is not justifiable at all.

That would be allowing individuals to be stalked in real time. That's not OK.

circumvention of the rules for a priveleged few (like those who know how to surveil the enforcement officers) is actual corruption. this service doesn't expose corruption, it enables it.

It's worth noting that SF Parking Control Officers aren't "police" by most any definition. They're not sworn, and they don't qualify as peace officers under California law. They can't execute warrants, make arrests, or carry firearms, etc. They work under the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), not the SFPD.

Their enforcement powers are limited to issuing parking citations, ordering tows, and directing traffic. About the only thing they share with actual police is the word "Officer" in the job title. Tracking these folks is about equivalent to tracking individual USPS employees.

As soon as the bodycams oh so requested by the Left were worn, it became slowly clear who the majority of perpetrators are in Cops vs. Blacks, Antifa, white liberal women... Now the Left's opinion seems to turn against these.

If it just showed where the cars were, that would be much better. Although still questionable IMHO.

It doesn't count the glass shop bill when the fire fighters gleefully fuck up your car to run the hose between the side windows.

Fire lanes are not express lanes for fire engines. They're more like reserved parking for fire engines only. Typically the curb is painted red, and you'll see markings 'no parking - fire lane'. I think of these showing up in parking lots everywhere you're not allowed to park.

Most of the parking violations are about the same level of fine. There's tiers, really big fines are for using disabled placards inappropriately, pretty big for blocking disabled parking, then blocking busses, abandoning vehicles, defaced license plate, no registration, blocking bike, then kind of everything else.

Fire lanes fit in the everything else, but they probably get more enforcement, so the low per instance fees add up if you are highly likely to be ticketted if you park in a red zone.

They'd rather have the fine be low for the people who are actually blocking the fire lanes in spirit in order to rake in the money from the people who are only doing it in technicality.

So if you've got a ticket, there almost certainly was a sweeper that came by at that time.

Of course we are on the corner and the other street does not get sweeping (it is also concrete). I assume that is because it is too steep.

So there could easily be secondary correlations between areas filled with people who are willing to fight invalid citations and that might correlate with wealth / crime rates.

(Just a random hypothetical thought, I'm not saying that is the case or their motivation, only that it theoretically could be)

"undergoing maintenance" but spot check of data looks correct to me.

Street cleaning tickets are given efficiently and enforcement is conducted to minimize the time that people can't park. 2-4 parking officers drive in front of the street cleaning vehicles and ticket everyone parked. if you're watching at the time you'll see almost every car on the street pull out in front of the officers, circle the block and park right back in the same -- but now clean -- spot. those that don't get tickets.

https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/drive-park/how-avoid-pa...

I just wish we had proper (read: higher, accounting for real negative externalities and likelihood of citation) fines for other violations that pose active public safety concerns such that SFMTA would be incentivized to also focus on those and not just the "easy" ones. It would also disincentivize antisocial behavior by repeat offenders.

If commercial drivers petitioned SFMTA to convert more private parking spaces into commercial zones I'd be signing petitions and backing them in their goal 100% of the way.

But generally I've found that commercial drivers would rather just violate the law and endanger others rather than engaging in activism for better infrastructure on our streets, so it's hard to feel sorry for them if they're cited and fined as a result.

I doubt it's the intention of the system to make all tickets "publicly visible" in this way.

I'm not sure we'll legal threats involved (who knows, hopefully not) but I suspect the city will be motivated to find some way to lock down the system to prevent this kind of enumeration attack on their database.

That said, in SF proper it's absolutely inarguably illegal as a violation called "Obstructing traffic" in the SF transportation code. A bike lane is an active travel lane for vehicles as defined under the CVC (including bicycles), and therefore stopping in one is illegal just like stopping in a car lane. I've had drivers cited for this in the past.

Fun fact: If there’s a bus or trolley car picking up passengers at the curb, you must pass it on the right in CA.

I’m almost tempted to try it when there’s no one but a cop around, and then hand the book to them when they pull me over for driving on the sidewalk.

"No person may place or park any bicycle, vehicle, or any other object upon any bikeway or bicycle path or trail, as specified in subdivision (a), which impedes or blocks the normal and reasonable movement of any bicyclist unless the placement or parking is necessary for safe operation or is otherwise in compliance with the law."

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-21211/

CVC §21209 says that you can park in a bike lane only if parking is otherwise permitted (e.g. it's a marked parking spot).

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-21209/

SF city code also lists it as a separate parking infraction: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...

Checking the DMV handbook, their description is similar. They say "it is illegal to drive in a bicycle lane unless you are parking (where permitted)" - plus turning or entering/exiting the road. [Source: CA Driver's Handbook, pp. 17, emphasis mine]

No illegally parked vehicles?

The negative externalities of illegally parked vehicles charged to the source?

I'll dream of that.

Your later comment that enforcement might benefit from latitude to be reasonable and accommodate nuance is not invalid, and you could have just said that rather than call the gp's aspiration "perverted." The expressed norm of guidelines is that your belief that the gp's logic is circular does not justify your derision.

Anyway, you will probably be more convincing to others by being less insulting.

If you don't want to contribute in adherence to the guidelines, what is the point of posting here at all?

But on that note, I absolutely do think that people should pay to store their private property on public land, and that they shouldn't block bus lanes, bike lanes or cross walks, or run red lights, so I fully support those rules and automated enforcement of them.

Why do you think those rules are bad?

You can also close your entire street for a block party. You just need a certain number of people on your block to sign the form approving it.

In general, the idea of a "market rate" for any given property depends fundamentally on a system of property rights actually being enforced.

In particular, SF receives very little rainfall for most of the year, which means that leaves and debris easily accumulate rather than being washed away at regular intervals.

Drivers also have a tendency to leave parts of their vehicles - like broken glass and plastic/metal shards - behind when they routinely crash into each other, which accumulate on the street. Without regular sweeping, those can pose hazards to other drivers and bicyclists, and risk being washed into the bay via storm drains if not swept.

It does not. All the way to street sweepers zooming down the street at full speed. All the way to NOT cleaning the street before a major event. All the way to ticketing people for a specific "street sweeping" time period but zooming down the middle of the street hours later when parked cars are back. San Francisco street and sidewalks are disgusting and it's their normal condition.

What it is, is a convenient way to write lots of tickets in not much time - as mentioned all over this discussion.

I think at the time the video was taken the red car had been there a while.

The video is not very high-resolution admittedly, but you can gather how things go. If you'd like, here's a screen grab https://imgur.com/a/YTymus3

Incurring higher costs than revenue is a common cause of business failures.

Also, I found out about his van getting towed because I scraped towing records from Autoreturn (the city's main towing provider - lots of corruption around that deal). Autoreturn's website at the time had a query parameter like "?towid=1", so you could increment that to pull all towing records.

I started working on a pretty in-depth data analysis and visualization, similar to what was done here, but I got caught up with my day job and some rock climbing dreams. I handed over all my research to a few local reporters a while back - they were really excited to talk to me in person about it, but I haven't seen anything published since.

We as humans need to ensure our actions are done with care are forethought. You can't control others but you can control yourself and influence others (like this comment attempts to do)

Plus, it's a lot cheaper for all of us if we don't need to constantly redesign once someone figures out how to "beat the game" (see Goodhart's Law). We're social creatures and the Tragedy of the Commons is a much more common occurrence than people think, especially in large cities.

Our actions affect others.

If there's no red paint on the curb, they won't ticket you.

This is official policy:

https://www.sfmta.com/blog/making-enforcement-fair-our-new-p...

Specifically, drivers who are "just running in" to grab a coffee or a pizza or whatever. What they don't understand is even a limited amount of time blocking the view of drivers can be catastrophic.

Parking up to the corner of an intersection is just a really dangerous, selfish thing to do.

I worked on a project where we could tell how many users were in a given store at a time (historically, not realtime) based on wifi traces, mobile data aggregation from carriers, and bluetooth pings. We could generally back it up to even general demographic data like how much disposable income the users were likely to have. Interesting project, deeply worrying how much data is running around out there.

(a) It should be automatic -- if they have the tech to enforce parking like a witch hunt, they should have the tech to just charge people for parking automatically just like Fastrak and everything else. Just have parking meters look for a Fastrak transponder and charge that account for parking, and also automatically send texts to the phone number and e-mail associated with the Fastrak account if time limit is reached. Make the city a good UX. Parking payment should be a zero-effort operation. I shouldn't have to make a wager on how many minutes I'm going to take to finish my meal and risk wagering too many minutes (overpaid) or too little (get fined). Just charge me according to my actual usage.

(b) Parking signs are too goddamn hard to parse, that's the real problem.

https://walzr.com/HDR2.jpg

As it is, it would likely be an effective way to track someone's routines. All you need is a license plate and you can likely get a list of many places they've been since 2008. That's especially true since it includes citations for things like street cleaning violations, which in my experience most people will get at least once when living somewhere. I bet a lot of those plates can be tied to at least the block the owner resides with this dataset.