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Find SF parking cops

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Re: Find SF parking cops

#61

Post by scottbez1 »

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, or red zone (including daylighting) violations.

Part of the issue is improper fine structure (though I think this is at least partly controlled by the state?) - tickets for blocking a bike lane are rarely written and therefore it's a good bet to just do it and odds are in aggregate it's cheaper than paying for parking legally.

UPS, FedEx, Amazon, Uber etc rely on this as a cheap cost of doing business, externalizing their costs onto the safety of the public. SFMTA even offers bulk payment discounts to UPS, when they should be charging escalating fines for repeat offenders.

Re: Find SF parking cops

#62

Post by primitivesuave »

I did a fascinating analysis of SFMTA data a few years back. They posted a public list of names and license plates [1] that they refuse to take down, despite many emails from me over the years. I found a particular license plate that belonged to a plumber with an impeccable 5 star reputation on Yelp, whose business in SF was effectively ended by street sweeping fines. He accidentally paid the same ticket twice, which resulted in his work vehicle being towed for excessive delinquency on the original ticket, which culminated in him moving his plumbing business to Utah.

I mentioned his 5 star reputation because several people got on Yelp over the years and described situations where he wouldn't even charge them money if he could fix something in a few minutes. It was very sad to learn how the SFTMA ran an honest plumber out of our city, and still won't take his name down off the list below (even 8 years after the deadline to respond).

I don't mean to draw undue attention to that list - please bombard the SFTMA with emails to take it down, it is a very obvious invasion of privacy and laughably unnecessary.

1. https://www.sfmta.com/reports/escheatment-posting-october-20...

Re: Find SF parking cops

#63

Post by echelon »

potato3732842 wrote: post #54
spankalee wrote: post #43

It would be great to see more automatic payment and enforcement. It's great that buses can issue tickets for blocking bus lanes, but I would absolutely love for their to be more automatic enforcement of blocking bike lanes and meter violations. I'm not in SF a lot these days, but I have noticed some particularly fancy parking meters that at least have tap-to-pay and might have more. Instead of a ticket, you should ju…

You only love it because you have some perverted dream of 100% enforcement of whatever your rules are. In reality automated enforcement would cause an uproar and the rules would be changed to accommodate the status quo.

> some perverted dream of 100% enforcement

No illegally parked vehicles?

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

I'll dream of that.

Re: Find SF parking cops

#64

Post by RyanOD »

Where I live, many people park at intersections right up to the curb making it almost impossible to see oncoming traffic from the right or left. Really scary when you have a 16-year old driver you're trying to keep safe.

There is a very real reason why most intersections require drivers to park 20-30 feet away. Please think of the safety of others and adhere to this rule.

Re: Find SF parking cops

#65

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jeffbee wrote: post #40
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traffic tickets are typically civil, not criminal.

[flagged]

> So is tax evasion

No.

“In the United States, tax evasion constitutes a crime” [1].

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tax_evasion

Re: Find SF parking cops

#66

Post by jonas21 »

enjoylife wrote: post #16

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...

Re: Find SF parking cops

#68

Post by [deleted] »

RyanOD wrote: post #64

Where I live, many people park at intersections right up to the curb making it almost impossible to see oncoming traffic from the right or left. Really scary when you have a 16-year old driver you're trying to keep safe. There is a very real reason why most intersections require drivers to park 20-30 feet away. Please think of the safety of others and adhere to this rule.

[deleted]
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