The parking police in San Francisco always seem to know when a car has stayed just seconds too long at a curb or a meter has gone unfed. They have license plate readers and other tools to detect errant vehicles.
But what if there was a way to track the parking officers themselves?
Last week, a website went viral after it showed icons with the initials of San Francisco’s parking police and the exact locations of their little white vehicles, from which they collectively issued a ticket every 24 seconds. The site worked for only four hours but prompted numerous headlines and generated social media buzz.
It was the latest handiwork of Riley Walz, a 23-year-old software engineer, who managed to reverse engineer the city’s parking ticket system to track every ticket moments after it was slapped on a car windshield.
“I made a website,” he wrote on X. “AVOID THE PARKING COPS.”
In a city that has long embraced eccentrics and their wacky ideas — and serves as the promised land for 20-somethings with cutting-edge tech skills — Mr. Walz is right at home. And he seems determined to keep punking San Francisco.
By day, Mr. Walz works with start-ups to help them create data projects. He also runs Numerous.ai, a site he co-founded that uses chatbots inside spreadsheets. It’s the kind of work that might otherwise make him an anonymous figure in the Bay Area.
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The post The Tech Jester Who Pranks San Francisco appeared first on New York Times.
