The guy behind the app we recently told you about that tracks the relative hotness of restaurant patrons has a new app that tracks SF's meter maids/parking cops in real time.

Riley Walz, the same app-maker behind Bop Spotter — which uses Shazam to pick up passing tunes from a mystery location in the Mission District — and LooksMapping, the restaurant "hotness" meter, has a pretty useful new app called Find My Parking Cops, which maps out the shift routes of every SF parking enforcement officer by the tickets they write, every day.

Walz posted a link to the app Tuesday morning on Xitter, and the Chronicle was tagging along with Walz on Monday as he tested it out, posting up at a popular citation location outside the Hyatt Regency where no stopping is allowed in the bus zone.

Update: The app has already been shut down by the SFTMA.


Walz, 23, has reportedly never owned a car, but figured out how to reverse-engineer the app by hunting down publicly available citation data from the SFMTA. Per the Chronicle, "Walz found that officers issue tickets in a sequential — but not consecutive — order," and using AI he was able to predict citation numbers and write a script to capture them as they're written.

On some, Walz notes, there are even personal notes which appear to be internal, and wouldn't appear on a printed citation — such as, "100% in marked bus stop red paint... called me an asshole."


If a user wants to track a specific officer, by their number, who patrols their neighborhood regularly, they now can, theoretically on Find My Parking Cops.

For instance, you can see that today, Officer 0336 was at the top of the weekly "leaderboard" for citations, issuing $16,500 worth since Monday morning, and they spent their Tuesday morning zigzagging through the Richmond District, issuing a number of tickets along Cabrillo Street and Clement Street.

How does the SFMTA feel about this? The agency gave a statement to the Chronicle saying, "Citations are a tool to ensure compliance with parking laws, which help keep our streets safe and use our limited curb space efficiently and fairly. We welcome any creative uses of technology to encourage legal parking, but we also want to make sure that our employees are able to do their jobs safely, and without disruption."

Related: Asinine Website Ranks SF Restaurant Patrons By Hotness, Using AI

Photo via SFMTA