Live parking tickets: Developer publishes parking ticket map for San Francisco
A resourceful developer has discovered that all parking tickets in San Francisco can easily be found online. He has created a live map from this.
On this real-time map, interested parties can see where parking tickets are currently being handed out in San Francisco
(Image: heise medien)
Anyone standing in a no-parking zone in San Francisco can currently get an overview of whether an enforcement officer is currently on the move in the neighborhood. Developer Riley Walz has developed a live map that shows where parking tickets are currently being handed out. This was made possible because he figured out the system that the city council uses to post parking tickets online so that they can be viewed by the offenders.
On his website, Walz explains that the parking tickets in the Californian city are issued by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, or SFMTA for short. Around 300 officers drive around the city in mostly small, single-seater vehicles and keep an eye out for traffic offenses. By his count, there would be a new ticket going online every 24 seconds on average.
ID pattern easy to see through
Anyone who receives a speeding ticket can view further details online using an ID printed on the ticket. These include the reason for the ticket, the registration number of the offending vehicle, the make, color, location, and initials of the issuing officer.
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For security reasons, this ID number is not simply incremented, so adding up one digit is not enough to view the speeding tickets of others. However, Walz discovered that the allocation system used is nevertheless quite easy to see through. At the time of his research, the IDs totaled around 992,000,000. According to him, the numbers were always simply added to 11. The only exception is if the last digit is a 6, then only 4 are added. No parking ticket would end in 7, 8, or 9.
Briefly off the grid, currently back again
Walz also discovered that the ticket inspectors' devices reserve IDs in packets of 100. His scraping solution for the city's website therefore looked at 300 incomplete packets of 100 at a time. By making queries every few seconds, he can count up from the respective start ID and display the tickets on an Apple Maps map almost in real time.
The map also shows which routes the anonymous ticket inspectors drive, which are the “most successful” (in terms of turnover), and how much the recipients of the tickets have to pay.
Shortly after Walz publicized his site on Tuesday evening German time, the city of San Francisco reacted and changed the data retrieval. On Wednesday morning German time, however, Walz announced that the site was now available again.
(mki)
