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.
I'm curious, how did his name being on this list significantly affect his business?
I live in a different country and I can't imagine checking the "traffic fine registry PDF on a random government website" when considering which plumber to hire.
I don't doubt that this caused him problems, I'm just trying to understand how.
I should have clarified - I only found his business through that list because I noticed his vanity license plate HPPYPPS, which corresponded to a business named Happy Pipes Plumbing which I subsequently found on Yelp.
Also, I found out about his van getting towed because I scraped towing records from Autoreturn (the city's main towing provider - lots of corruption around that deal). Autoreturn's website at the time had a query parameter like "?towid=1", so you could increment that to pull all towing records.
I started working on a pretty in-depth data analysis and visualization, similar to what was done here, but I got caught up with my day job and some rock climbing dreams. I handed over all my research to a few local reporters a while back - they were really excited to talk to me in person about it, but I haven't seen anything published since.
Thanks for clarifying! So basically his van kept getting towed and he kept losing business as a result? Presumably it also cost him to recover his vehicle. So in summary, if you got on this list you're just permanently screwed in SF? And you can get on this list by paying a fine twice by accident?
> "?towid=1"
Funnily, incrementing that number in the country I live in would itself be a crime. If the company I did this to found out, they could probably take me to court and win.
More likely is he paid a ticket incorrectly. Someone said he paid the same ticket twice instead of paying each ticket once. Then the city racked up delinquency fines while making little to no effort to inform him of these fines or the outstanding ticket. One day, he gets towed and can't get his van back until thousands of dollars in fines and penalties are paid from a ticket that he thought had been taken care of long ago.
I don't understand or this makes no sense. If he paid the ticket twice, shouldn't SFTMA own him money? Why was it delinquent if he paid twice? Something does not add up in this story.
Just to confirm, this is what happened - he paid one twice, and therefore the other became delinquent. However, if you file a FOIA request with the SFMTA and do some basic analysis on how much is "owed per license plate", you will see that certain license plates have been allowed to accrue tens of thousands of dollars in parking fines with virtually no towing repercussions, going back as far as data is available (2013). Around 80-90% of these vehicles are rental cars, around 5-8% of them are commercial trucking companies which absorb the cost of 2 tickets per day, and this tiny 1% of license plates are effectively "lawless parkers" who drive high-end cars and accrue tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid parking fines every year.
Generally to keep streets safe to drive on, and pleasant to live near.
In particular, SF receives very little rainfall for most of the year, which means that leaves and debris easily accumulate rather than being washed away at regular intervals.
Drivers also have a tendency to leave parts of their vehicles - like broken glass and plastic/metal shards - behind when they routinely crash into each other, which accumulate on the street. Without regular sweeping, those can pose hazards to other drivers and bicyclists, and risk being washed into the bay via storm drains if not swept.
I have a video from a street I used to live on that might illustrate what happens in between cleanings (you'll have to turn the camera view down to face the curb to see): https://youtu.be/ew4fMB7OIyo?t=8
I think at the time the video was taken the red car had been there a while.
The video is not very high-resolution admittedly, but you can gather how things go. If you'd like, here's a screen grab https://imgur.com/a/YTymus3
> Why the hell does SF need to sweep the streets so much?
It does not. All the way to street sweepers zooming down the street at full speed. All the way to NOT cleaning the street before a major event. All the way to ticketing people for a specific "street sweeping" time period but zooming down the middle of the street hours later when parked cars are back. San Francisco street and sidewalks are disgusting and it's their normal condition.
What it is, is a convenient way to write lots of tickets in not much time - as mentioned all over this discussion.
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...