SF311 is San Francisco's reporting platform for non-emergencies and allows residents to report illegal parking violations via their phone or the SF311 website or app. However, the app is poorly designed and the data it generates is not well used by the SFMTA.

The SF311 app (below) provides a basic reporting interface that prioritizes vehicles blocking private driveways over those that block the public right of way. A better approach is demonstrated by Safe Lanes, a free app we built in 2019 to provide a faster, more accurate way to report illegal parking violations to SF311. Safe Lanes prioritizes safety critical violations, alerts the user to repeat offenders and automatically reads the license plate and location data in the photos you take. To date, over 30,000 illegal parking reports have been submitted to SF311 via Safe Lanes.

Even when the SF311 app is used, few complaints result in a citation. Of the approximately 250 illegal parking complaints submitted to SF311 daily, fewer than 25% result in a citation. The SFMTA needs a data-driven, dynamic enforcement strategy that responds faster and ensures more complaints result in a citation. One way to approach this is to automatically assign the nearest parking control officer (PCO) to each complaint as they come in and have PCOs on standby in known hot spots. Instead Shawn McCormick, director of parking enforcement at SFMTA, explains how he uses low-fidelity heat maps to guide parking enforcement at a recent hearing at City Hall.

There are approximately 466,000 registered cars in San Francisco and approximately 456,000 people drive into the city each day. We all make mistakes: it’s easy to forget to feed a meter or move your vehicle for street cleaning. However some drivers clearly could care less about parking restrictions and continue to rack up thousands of citations and hundreds of thousands in dollars in fines.

Repeat offenders are not just harming themselves. In the most extreme cases, drivers who repeatedly disregard minor infractions can go on to cause significant harm to others: in March 2023, for example, a driver in Washington D.C. with 43 speeding tickets slammed into a Honda sedan, killing all three passengers inside. It is a statistical inevitability that the more drivers disregard codes and put vulnerable road users in harm’s way, the more likely serious injuries and deaths and become. Drivers who repeatedly endanger the public must be held accountable.

To better target these problematic repeat offenders, who pose threats to both safety and public order, the SFMTA needs to harden its enforcement strategy: it could raise fines for these serial violators or even push for the revocation of driving privileges. But first, they should be accelerating infrastructure improvements which make it harder if not impossible to illegally park a vehicle in the first place. As this interactive map of the 50 most egregious repeat offenders shows, repeat offenders in some locations are likely commercial delivery drivers who could benefit from more loading zones. Similarly, if the SFMTA built actual protected bike lanes that use concrete barriers instead of plastic sticks, fewer drivers would be able to park in them.

We analyzed illegal parking behavior on 14 major retail corridors Valencia Street, Polk Street, Haight Street, Fillmore Street, Clement Street, Grant Avenue, Columbus Avenue, Market Street, Union Street, Third Street, Union Square, Inner Sunset, The Castro and Fisherman's Wharf and found:

San Francisco's retail corridors are its most active public spaces aside from its parks and must be safe and accessible for all visitors. The SFMTA must prioritize parking enforcement along retail corridors and ensure that businesses have abundant space to accept deliveries.