Jurisdiction data snapshot
San Francisco writes 1.27 million parking citations a year
An analysis of the City of San Francisco's own published citation records shows the sheer scale of parking enforcement — $130M in fines in 2024 alone — concentrated in a knowable set of repeat plates. That's exactly the reach a consented, resident-facing reminder layer is built for.
Source: DataSF Open Data · 23.9M citations since 2008 · figures below are calendar-year 2024A small share of plates drives most citations
Of the 510,971 plates cited in 2024, 208,393 received two or more citations — just 41% of plates, but responsible for 964,228 citations (76% of the total). Nearly 54,000 plates were cited five or more times. Reaching those drivers reliably is the single highest-leverage lever for on-time payment.
208,393 repeat plates
41% of cited plates → 76% of all citations. A consented reminder reaches the exact drivers who generate the most volume.
~54,000 plates cited 5+ times
Chronic repeat parking behavior that today gets a mailed notice per event — easy to miss, easy to let escalate.
What drives the volume (2024)
Street cleaning alone accounts for well over half of all citations. These are routine, high-frequency, easy-to-forget events — the sweet spot for reminders.
Note: SF publishes violation types as short codes (e.g. "STR CLEAN", "MTR OUT DT"). Labels above are expanded; the two meter codes are merged.
Where it happens (2024)
Citations concentrate around downtown, the Embarcadero, and a handful of corridors.
How TheTrafficApp helps
We add a consented, resident-facing reminder layer on top of the enforcement and payment systems SFMTA already runs — no change to pricing, process, or the official record.
1 · Residents opt in
Drivers authorize us (clear consent + DPPA permissible-use basis) to monitor citations on their plates.
2 · Timely reminders
They get an alert when a citation posts — with a one-tap link to SFMTA's official payment page — before it escalates.
3 · More on-time payment
Across 1.27M citations a year, even a small lift in on-time payment is meaningful recovered revenue and fewer escalations.
4 · $0 to pilot
A narrow pilot reading public citation data. We never take the payment or touch the official record.
An honest note on SF's data
Unlike some cities, SF's public dataset does not include a payment-status field, so we can't quantify an unpaid dollar figure here (see the Norfolk report, where $2.88M unpaid is measurable). What SF's data does show is scale and repeat-offender concentration — exactly the reach a notification layer delivers.
Sources & method
Figures are computed directly from the City of San Francisco's published SFMTA Parking Citations
open dataset (DataSF resource ab4h-6ztd), which contains 23.9M citations since 2008.
Headline numbers use calendar year 2024 (1,266,807 citations). Dollar figures use the
fine_amount field; volume and repeat-plate figures are aggregated across 2024. SF does not publish
a payment-status field. This is a point-in-time snapshot of public records to illustrate scale — not a claim
about any individual driver. Data: data.sfgov.org.
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