241–250 of 498 posts
Not that I am not annoyed by parking tickets, but I am also thankful for the enforcement when I use any means of moving through the city other than a car and at least where I live parking violations are really under-enforced. Maybe that's the difference in San Francisco?
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This is fantastic. It really signals that the point is not to get money from you, but to free up the parking spot.
They also ticket without towing, where the point is entirely to get money from you.
A tow truck is only something you'd call for assistance, not something you fear seeing.
(Parking fines suck, but the municipal ones are usually more reasonable here, even if they don't always get the rules right. It's the parking companies managing large private parking lots, often for free to the lot owner, that are absurd.)
Amazing to see the scale of it. As a piece of feedback my assumption is that different officers are assigned to different areas and so since street sweeping is either the first and third or second and fourth week of the month for most residential areas, this will allow different officers to float to the top in different weeks. Having at least a 2 week lookback for the leaderboard is probably best. Otherwise great wor…
> street sweeping is either the first and third or second and fourth week of the month for most residential areas On my block we get it 2x/week. I've never seen a street sweeper come by and the street is always dirty, but I sure have gotten tickets for leaving my vehicle out front overnight on the wrong day.
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If so, then the DMV test is (presumably) wrong. California Vehicle Code §21211 says it's generally illegal to block a bike lane: "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 i…
Note that 21209 does not say "otherwise permitted" but "permitted." One interpratation (perhaps what the DMV is using) is that, since curb parking is generally permitted, parking in a bike lane that abuts the curb would also be generally permitted. The city I live in put up "no parking in bike lane" signs everywhere, presumably to address this ambiguity. FWIW the DMV test question was bad in other ways; it was a mult…
That pattern feels suspiciously like how a tacked-on modulo check-digit would act.
It seems the real citation number, x, excludes the last digit, and you only needed to +1 increment to it.
Then they tack on a last digit, a check-digit, of (x+1) mod 7. That would be the same pattern.
The contract for the system does have the clause "validate the data transcribed from handwritten Citations…a check-digit algorithm to control errors in the Citation number field" https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
Officer 0336 is raking it in for the city. I wonder if there is a correlation with the areas which generate a lot of tickets and other city datasets. Perhaps crime rate or average household income?
You'll probably find a high correlation with the street cleaning dataset (if there is one). Nearly all of the tickets at the top of the leaderboard are street sweeping violations. I wonder if street cleaning is net profitable for the city once you factor in tickets. That would make cutting the cleaning frequency [1] a doubly bad idea. [1] https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/18/san-francisco-city-hall-st...
(Just a random hypothetical thought, I'm not saying that is the case or their motivation, only that it theoretically could be)
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Note that 21209 does not say "otherwise permitted" but "permitted." One interpratation (perhaps what the DMV is using) is that, since curb parking is generally permitted, parking in a bike lane that abuts the curb would also be generally permitted. The city I live in put up "no parking in bike lane" signs everywhere, presumably to address this ambiguity. FWIW the DMV test question was bad in other ways; it was a mult…
What was the double negative? You haven't included one in your telling of the question ( "Which of these is not an illegal place to park:" with the correct answer being "in a bike lane." - that's just a single negative...)
Incredible work. I'm disappointed to see so many of the leaderboard items are street cleaning tickets. I get it - street cleaning are "easy" tickets to write in bulk, and therefore efficient ROI for PCO time, but they're not the most important violations to cite compared to safety-critical things like blocked bike lanes (which SFMTA has an official policy to completely ignore citizen reports thereof), double-parking,…
Where should the delivery trucks park if there is no infrastructure for them and the public has an ever increasing appetite for delivered products? Try to think about it from the delivery drivers point of view and their safety. The roads are not any one users exclusive resource. We all pay for them and they must be shared.
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They also ticket without towing, where the point is entirely to get money from you.
Where I'm from there's no concept of towing on any parking violations. No one has the right to touch your vehicle, and if the police is involved they'd just contact the owner. The police would only move a car if it's a danger to the public. A tow truck is only something you'd call for assistance, not something you fear seeing. (Parking fines suck, but the municipal ones are usually more reasonable here, even if they…