Anyone who has parked in San Francisco knows that each street presents myriad possible ways to get a ticket.
San Francisco, CA
This S.F. engineer wants to make it easier to park in the city, with a free app
Parking can be difficult in San Francisco neighborhoods like the Excelsior. But an engineer who lives in the city wants to make it easier with an app to help people park.
There are loading zones. Two- and four-hour restrictions. Scheduled street cleanings. Sprawling construction sites. Red “daylit” curbs to make crosswalks more visible. Hills where curbing wheels is mandatory.
Frustrated by the whole complex puzzle of rules and hard-to-read signs, a software engineer is cobbling an app to make them more legible. His invention, called “Ticketless,” would automatically detect when and where people have parked, and send notifications if they risk receiving a citation.
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“I feel like a lot of people need this,” engineer Abdullah Zahid said of the app, which he hopes to unveil within the next few weeks. A resident of the Outer Richmond, Zahid has learned to navigate all the landmines of parking in San Francisco, including the regular 9 a.m. cleanings on his block. He knows the agony of circling for 20 minutes to find that one elusive parking spot at 6 p.m. in the Mission District, only to walk half a block and see a sign warning not to park there.
Abdullah Zahid has created an app called “Ticketless” which would automatically detect when and where people have parked in San Francisco.
When Zahid advertised the concept on Reddit, his post went viral. As of Monday, Ticketless had roughly 1,000 people on a waiting list.
He is among a group of tech-savvy do-gooders — and pranksters — who are mining data from San Francisco’s public websites and trying to make it more accessible to regular people. Another such innovator, Patrick McCabe, developed an app called SolveSF, which uses artificial intelligence to ease the process of filing reports to the city’s 311 system.
City leaders do not always welcome these creations. When North Beach software engineer Riley Walz rolled out an app to track city parking officers in real time, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency quickly cut off the data source.
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But Zahid’s mission seems to align with that of the SFMTA, in that he wants to help people park legally and safely, perhaps saving them from a colossally expensive mistake, or the headache of retrieving a car from a tow yard.
“Our ultimate goal for parking enforcement is compliance, and we welcome creative ideas if it means bringing safe and helpful reminders on how to properly park,” a spokesperson for SFMTA said in a statement, which included the agency’s own guide on legal parking. SFMTA declined to comment on the app specifically, without knowing precisely how it uses public data.
Abdullah Zahid’s app “Ticketless” would send notifications to people if their parked cars risk receiving a citation.
Zahid’s model largely relies on the city portal DataSF, combined with smart algorithms to decipher when and where people have parked, once they share their location. The app then cross-checks the parking spot with local regulations, determines when the driver has to move, and provides push alerts two hours in advance.
“There are no user accounts, no premium features, no in-app purchases,” Zahid said. “I’m not trying to monetize this. I think it should be free for everyone.”
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At present, he has the app configured to find hourly restrictions, tow-away zones and commercial loading. He’d still like to make it more granular, possibly reminding people to turn their wheels on a sloped street, or recognizing the exact point where a red zone ends.
Maybe he’ll add those features in the next version.