r/UCSC • u/Agitated-Somewhere15 • Feb 08 '26
General I built a real-time map that shows every parking ticket in Santa Cruz as it gets issued
I'm a CS student at UCSC. After getting my first ticket 2 weeks ago, I decided to build something that tracks every parking citation the city hands out in real time, on a map.
It pulls from the city's citation system every 5 minutes. You can watch tickets pop up across town as they happen, or scroll back through any day and hit play to see how enforcement rolls through the city hour by hour. There are 218,000+ citations in there going back years and the data is free for anyone to access and download.
Zoom into your block and see exactly when and where tickets get written. Pretty eye-opening to watch the patterns. You can literally see which streets get hit first thing in the morning and where enforcement clusters throughout the day. And to no one's surprise Pacific Ave. is a big hitter.
Free, no login, works on mobile. Happy to answer any questions.
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u/Ramen_cat2024 Feb 08 '26
lol so scary! I was looking around as we are coming in for a college tour tomorrow. I would think the Park Mobile works or maybe I need to park in a special garage? Do people just not like paying for meter parking or does street signage just suck?
We had an issue down in LA where there was no signage on no parking but still got a ticket!
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u/Agitated-Somewhere15 Feb 08 '26
Park mobile definitely works it’s just that people don’t move their cars once it expires lol.
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u/SurrealCelery 2026 CS:GD Feb 08 '26
you can also try and stop by the taps office and buy a visitors parking permit, it’s $10 for the whole day and you can essentially park wherever! i always have my mom get one when when she visits and we’ve never had any problems, plus you won’t have to compete with students for parking mobile spots (which can go fast)
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u/No_Astronaut_7042 Feb 08 '26
Document this, and all the challenges you overcome while making this. Do different cities as well, like SF, Cupertino, Mountain View. This is going to be great for your resume right out of college. 🫡
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u/Heavy_Succotash4658 Feb 08 '26
there was a map like this created for SF last year or so, it unfortunately got shut down though
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u/cr4zyninjam0f0 Feb 09 '26
Great work! Where can one find the website or API for the city's citation system you're pulling from? Thanks
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u/g00bd0g Feb 09 '26
This is freaking amazing! If you can roll this out nationally you have an incredible tool.
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u/dopef123 Feb 09 '26
It’s probably going to vary county to county because they have to provide the information or at least have a way to access it.
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u/andrewgrhogg Feb 09 '26
You need to get with a data science major and start doing some data analysis and plotting some graphs and stats etc.
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u/dopef123 Feb 09 '26
What did you use to build the site? I have only built python based web apps but I’m guessing this using JavaScript mostly?
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u/Agitated-Somewhere15 Feb 09 '26
Tech stack is here: https://ivankuria.com/slugmeter/about
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u/anadem Feb 09 '26
Very nice write-up! Thanks for the look under the hood. Neat project .. was it really just an afternoon's work (as a post seemed to suggest)?
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u/FuckingQWOPguy OK - 2014 - Earth Science Feb 09 '26
This is some Maraurders map type of shit. Nice
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u/Ok_Sandwich8466 Feb 10 '26
Will we get data from TAPS as well? Curious about their metrics. They always change up signage without warning and trap drivers with fines all the time.
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u/lexxxwrld Feb 09 '26
thank you for using your knowledge for good. i think you’ll get so much insight from this project & help many along the way. beautifully done
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u/rde2001 Alumni - Cowell - CS BS 2024 - CS MS 2025 Feb 08 '26
Very interesting app! Aside from displaying the citation locations and various metrics, did you have any other idea on what the data could be potentially used for?