Quick Take
Third-year UC Santa Cruz student Ivan Kuria built a website that maps and tracks every parking ticket issued in the city of Santa Cruz, and also shows daily tickets going back years. Although the site no longer updates, viewers can still see daily maps of tickets issued between 2020 and Feb. 11.
When Ivan Kuria got his first parking ticket near his Westside apartment in late January, he made what most people would view as a moderate annoyance into an opportunity.
Kuria, a third-year computer science student at UC Santa Cruz, decided to build a website that allows anyone to view interactive, live maps of the city that show when and where each parking citation is issued on any given day in the city of Santa Cruz. Although his ticket pushed him to actually build the program, he said he’d been thinking about the idea for months, after reading about Riley Walz, a San Francisco man who created an app last fall that allowed people to see the location of the city’s parking officers in nearly real time.
“At the time, I just saw it as something interesting, then when I got my ticket I decided to explore it a little bit,” Kuria, 21, told Lookout. “San Francisco has a larger budget and more resources, and given that their system wasn’t that secure, I figured Santa Cruz was probably the same.”
In order to actually view and eventually map the tickets, Kuria said he had to figure out how to search for tickets on the city’s citation payment website without actually having the specific citation right in front of him. He described the process as “a lot of guesswork” to start, since it was difficult to determine exactly what each number on the citations referred to. After some experimenting, he figured out how each citation number was structured and what each digit stood for. They included the year the ticket was issued, “SC” for the city, the number identifying the machine used to issue the ticket, and a series of five digits that corresponded to the number of tickets that the machine had issued.
“I just decided to increment my own ticket number just by one to see if I could find someone else’s ticket number,” he said. “I was instantly able to find someone else’s ticket. Then it was just a matter of doing that long enough to see how many tickets were issued by each hardware device. Basically, I’m simulating people navigating to the portal and entering their ticket number, and then I’m able to get all the info from the Santa Cruz servers.”
He said each individual citation itself provided just about everything he needed like the time and date the issuing officer gave the ticket, along with more sensitive information like the ticketed vehicle’s license plate and vehicle identification number (VIN), which Kuria didn’t need or use.
Kuria didn’t stop at February, or just the start of the year, or even all of 2025. He decided to go through the same process for all of the ticket-issuing devices going back to 2020. The end result is a comprehensive look at all 218,000-plus parking tickets issued in the city each day going back to late January 2020, updating every five minutes — that is, until just four days after Kuria launched the site on Super Bowl Sunday. Why did it stop? Kuria ended up meeting with the city himself to discuss his findings, which led to the city making some back-end changes to add another layer of protection for customer information.
City of Santa Cruz Public Works spokesperson Ashley Hussey told Lookout that Kuria met with the city’s parking manager and discussed his observations of the system. She said it was a “constructive conversation” that led to the city adjusting its software and increasing the system security.
The city updated its site to require both the citation number and either the ticketed vehicle’s plate number or VIN, rather than just the former, in order to access citation information. Kuria recommended that the city do this after learning about its system through his experiments.
“That’s actually something that TAPS [UCSC Transportation and Parking Services] does for our campus citations,” he said.
The major drawback, of course, is that once the city implemented this change, the site could no longer pull ticket information for new citations by just the citation number alone, effectively putting an end to live updates just half a week after its launch. Unfortunately, said Kuria, it’s likely to stay that way.
“I would say it’s basically impossible to get it back up and running,” he said. “But it was mostly something I did for fun and thought it would be interesting for people to look at.”
And although the site hasn’t been updated since Feb. 11, Kuria was able to successfully build a resource for people to see where they are most likely to be ticketed in the city. To probably no one’s surprise, Pacific Avenue and the downtown side streets, as well as the area around the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, are hot spots for parking citations.
The site is still up and viewable for anyone seeking a guide to understanding parking enforcement patterns in an effort to avoid parking tickets.
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