Vol. I, No. 31 · San Francisco — Monday, August 31, 2026 · Price: meter expired 2021
BY MAXINE DOLAN, CITY DESK
At the corner of Mission and 11th Streets, San Francisco’s parking officers wrote 540 citations in the year ending in July, more than one a day at a single intersection.
That corner is a sliver of a much larger total. Mission and 11th sits at the northern edge of SFMTA’s Mission boundary. It is close enough to Market Street that a passerby might call the intersection SoMa, not the Mission. The agency’s own neighborhood lines govern every number in this story, though, and they draw the Mission that far north, not only down to the more commonly assumed edge near 16th Street.
Over the same year, the Mission generated $15.5 million in parking-citation revenue, more than any of San Francisco’s 41 neighborhoods. It beat the Financial District/South Beach bucket, SFMTA’s own category bundling downtown’s office towers with the condos and ballpark blocks of South Beach, by $2.5 million, and it out-earned South of Market by nearly two to one. A driver circling for curb space in the Mission is competing with the most heavily ticketed streets in the city.
San Francisco’s neighborhoods split $145.4 million in parking fines over the same twelve months, up 6.6 percent from the year before. The Mission’s $15.5 million was 10.7 percent of that citywide total, from just under 140,000 citations, itself 10.6 percent of every ticket written in the city. The Financial District and South Beach ranked second, at $13.1 million. South of Market was third, at $8.5 million, and the Tenderloin fourth, at $7.6 million.
The Mission’s lead held even as its own numbers moved in different directions. Citations there fell 2.4 percent from the year before, to 139,214, while the fines they carried rose 2.7 percent, to $15.5 million. Fewer tickets for more money apiece is the same direction the whole city moved. Citywide, citation counts grew a modest 1.5 percent while total fines grew 6.6 percent. That gap points to rising fine amounts, more than heavier enforcement, as the main driver of the year’s increase.
The gap is not the product of a harsher rulebook aimed at one neighborhood. Street cleaning is the single largest citation category everywhere in San Francisco, accounting for 38.7 percent of every ticket written in the past year. In the Mission it is 38.5 percent, statistically the same share. Expired meters, residential-permit violations and the rest of the file track just as closely to the citywide mix. The Mission is not policed under a different set of rules. It is a slightly larger version of how every San Francisco neighborhood gets ticketed, and larger, in this city, adds up to $15.5 million a year.
One number in the file needs a caveat before it travels further. The single address that drew the most citations in the Mission was not a curb at all. 42 Hoff Street, an SFMTA-run parking lot, drew 911 citations, most of them coded FACIL CRG, the agency’s own term for a citation written inside one of its facilities rather than on the street. The same code, at a comparable volume, tops the list at SFMTA’s Pierce Street Garage across town. It is a real number, and it is not evidence of an unusually harsh curb outside anyone’s door.
Confidence in the ranking itself is high, drawn directly from SFMTA’s own citation file with no modeling in between. The numbers cannot say why. The Mission’s mix of double-parked deliveries, dense street parking and a busy commercial corridor might draw more patrols, or more patrols might simply find more of what is already there. That is a question for a future edition, not this one.
SFMTA’s Vehicle-Location File Hasn’t Logged a Row in Nearly 5 Years
SFMTA’s file of live bus and train positions is built to reset every New Year’s Day. It has not recorded a single new position since December 30, 2021, nearly five years and five missed resets ago.
BY INES CALLOWAY, TRANSIT DESK
Ten vehicles reported their positions to San Francisco’s transit agency at 11:59:59 p.m. on December 30, 2021. One of them, out on the city’s western side, was still moving, at nine miles an hour. It was the last position SFMTA’s live vehicle-tracking file has ever recorded.
SFMTA publishes a file built to answer a simple question: where has every Muni bus and train actually been, and how fast was it moving. The file is supposed to reset itself automatically every January 1, filing the prior year away as its own archive. It has done that exactly once. Five New Year’s Days have now passed since that December night, and none of them triggered a reset. None of this means Muni itself went dark: buses and trains have kept running on their own schedules the whole time. What broke is this one backend file, and anyone using it today to ask how fast Muni is moving is, without being told, reading a description of December 2021.
The file, titled “Transit Vehicle Location History (Current Year),” holds 470,470,157 rows, one for every reported position of every SFMTA vehicle running in 2021. The pattern it broke had worked before. A companion file holding the 2020 data, 403,068,529 rows, was properly closed out and archived when 2021 began. No archive exists for 2022. None exists for 2023, 2024, 2025 or 2026. The rollover that worked once simply stopped.
The page was not entirely forgotten. Its listing was edited on February 18, 2025, more than three years after the last new position arrived, changing text on the page without adding a single new row beneath it. A second SFMTA feed, publishing live vehicle locations in a different format, also stopped updating within months of the same freeze, in May 2022. Whatever broke was not confined to one file. The likeliest explanation is mundane rather than mysterious. Transit agencies nationwide shifted their live-location feeds to the standardized GTFS-realtime format around 2021 and 2022. A routine migration off these older files would look exactly like this, without anything having gone wrong. This desk could not confirm that explanation by deadline.
That file was SFMTA’s only open record of how fast the system was actually moving, block by block. It has now been silent more than three times longer than it was ever kept current: about 554 days of live updates against more than 1,700 days of silence since.
Confidence in the freeze itself is high. It rests on a timestamp read directly from the government’s own server, confirmed this weekend. This dataset cannot answer why the rollover stopped, and this desk did not attempt to reach SFMTA for comment before deadline.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. SFMTA Parking Citations & Fines, DataSF ab4h-6ztd, queried August 31, 2026, twelve months ending August 1, 2026 (2025-08-01 through 2026-08-01) unless noted: citywide 1,317,658 citations, $145,447,155.35 in fines; the same window one year earlier (2024-08-01 through 2025-08-01): 1,298,691 citations, $136,481,803.00 (fines +6.6%, citations +1.5% year over year). By neighborhood, current window: Mission 139,214 citations / $15,532,031.00 (10.6% of citywide citations, 10.7% of citywide fines); Financial District/South Beach 108,784 / $13,056,292.16; South of Market 74,903 / $8,487,080.00; Tenderloin 66,861 / $7,562,229.00; Marina 61,749 / $6,640,294.00; Pacific Heights 51,151 / $5,506,077.00; Sunset/Parkside 47,824 / $5,237,457.00; Nob Hill 45,793 / $5,062,158.00. Mission, prior-year window: 142,660 citations / $15,120,076.00 (citations −2.4%, fines +2.7% year over year). Violation-type mix, current window: STR CLEAN (street cleaning) is 510,263 of 1,317,658 citywide citations (38.7%) and 53,605 of 139,214 Mission citations (38.5%). Citation-location counts, Mission, current window: Mission St & 11th St 540; 42 Hoff St 911 total, of which 661 coded FACIL CRG (a citation issued inside an SFMTA-operated facility rather than on-street); the same violation code tops the citywide list at 3252 Pierce Street Garage, 982 citations. Full queries and raw responses in receipts.json.
2. SFMTA Transit Vehicle Location History (Current Year), DataSF x344-v6h6, queried August 30–31, 2026: 470,470,157 rows, vehicle_position_date_time ranging 2021-01-01T00:00:00 to 2021-12-30T23:59:59; dataset rows last updated 2021-12-31 (Socrata API rowsUpdatedAt field), page metadata (viewLastModified) last touched 2025-02-18 with no corresponding new rows; dataset created 2020-06-10, first published 2020-06-24 (554 days of live updates before the freeze, against 1,705 days of silence since, through August 31, 2026). At the file’s final timestamp, 2021-12-30T23:59:59, 10 distinct vehicle_ids reported a position; vehicle 1483, at approximately 37.7422°N/122.4648°W on the city’s western side, reported heading 30° and average_speed 9 (mph, unitless field, cross-checked against typical street speeds). Companion archive “Transit Vehicle Location History (2020),” DataSF 48aa-8sj9, queried August 31, 2026: 403,068,529 rows, properly closed out for that calendar year. No 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 or 2026 version of the “current year” file, and no post-2021 annual archive, exists in DataSF’s catalog under this series (searched via the catalog API, August 31, 2026). 2. SFMTA “Real Time Vehicle Position GTFS (PB File),” DataSF uyt2-vrrn, checked via DataSF’s catalog metadata August 31, 2026: last updated 2022-05-18, a separate live-location feed that stopped in the same window. Full queries and raw responses in receipts.json.
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