u/viziomas

Know your curb.

Not selling anything — just thought this was worth sharing.

I got curious about how SF street-cleaning enforcement actually works, so I pulled the public SFMTA citation data (~659,000 street-cleaning tickets) and matched each one to the block it was written on.

The surprise: the posted "2-hour" sweep window is mostly a ~22-minute reality. On a typical block, 87.4% of tickets are written in the first 45 minutes after the window opens. The sweeper comes through right after it starts and is basically gone — but the sign still says you're at risk for the full two hours.

One example: 214–255 Steiner St, posted 9–11am. Over two years: 203 tickets, earliest at 9:00am sharp, median ticket at 9:14am, 90% written by 9:39am. The second hour of that window is effectively decorative.

A few other things in the data:

• The fine is now $105.
• Enforcement is surging where the city's building — Mission Bay +107%, Financial District/South Beach +68% vs five years ago.
• The Mission is the most-ticketed neighborhood: 71,129 tickets, ~$7.2M over two years.

Timely: SF suspends daytime street-sweeping enforcement tomorrow for Juneteenth, so you don't have to move your car for posted sweeping — but the posted sign is always the final word.

Happy to share the breakdown for any specific block or neighborhood if anyone's curious.

Quick heads-up before the holiday, because this trips people up every year.

Tomorrow is Juneteenth (Fri, June 19), and SF suspends daytime street-sweeping enforcement. So if your block normally gets the 6am–2pm sweep that day, you do **not** need to move your car for it, and you won't get a ticket.

What's still enforced, so you don't get caught out:

•   Overnight street cleaning (the 12am–6am routes) — still on
•   Parking meters — still on
•   Red/white/blue zones, no-parking, tow-aways — still on
•   Residential permit (RPP) time limits — suspended for the day

The mistake I see every year: people either move their car the night before for nothing, or they assume the sweeper actually ran on the holiday and get comfortable — then eat a ticket the next service day when the normal schedule is back. It's a one-day thing; your regular sign is live again the following sweep day.

If you want to confirm it for your exact block, SFMTA posts the official holiday enforcement schedule, that's the authority.

Enjoy the day off from the 7am car shuffle.

I've paid enough street-cleaning tickets to get curious, so I pulled SFMTA's public citation data (every parking ticket since 2008 is on DataSF) and matched ~650,000 street-cleaning tickets back to the exact block each one was written on.

The sign says a two-hour window. The actual enforcement isn't two hours. On the typical block, every single ticket over two years falls inside the same ~22-minute span — almost always right after the window opens. On 87% of blocks, the whole stretch of tickets is written within 45 minutes. The first block I looked at is posted 9–11am: the typical ticket lands at 9:14am, and 90% of tickets are written by 9:39. The back half of these windows is, statistically, dead air.

(Caveat, because I'd ask too: SFMTA stopped geocoding citations years ago, so this is a fuzzy address-string → block join, not GPS. It's directionally solid across 650k records but any single block can be off — the posted sign is always the real answer.)

Two other things fell out of the data:

• Street cleaning is the city's #1 ticket by a wide margin — roughly half a million a year. (The fine is $105 now, up from ~$73 a few years back.) These are fines written, not necessarily collected — but it's clearly a structural line, not a rounding error.
• SFMTA's open parking dataset doesn't include color curb, so I went to the city's own ArcGIS curb layer and pulled all ~1,975 white passenger-loading zones — 627 of them next to schools. I couldn't find those mapped anywhere, so I put them on the map.

So I built the thing I kept wishing existed: curb.guide — every curb in SF colored by its next sweep (green = clear, amber = soon, red = move now). Tap a block and you get the posted schedule and the real ticket-time pattern behind it, plus permit zones, loading zones, and an optional alert the night before and ~30 min before the sweeper.

Before anyone asks: it's free, no account, no ads, no tracking, open source (MIT). And no — it's not the thing that tracked enforcement cars and got killed in four hours. There's no live anything. SF doesn't publish real-time sweeper GPS; this is purely two years of historical public records, aggregated by block, refreshed monthly. No officer data, nothing real-time. And it's a guide, not legal advice — the posted sign always wins. (Also: "just read the sign" / "isn't this an alarm clock" — fair, except the sign only gives you the 2-hour window, the data gives you the 22-minute reality inside it, and a calendar reminder doesn't know which block or side you parked on.)

Genuinely curious whether your block matches: does the ticket-time pattern it shows line up with when you've actually been hit?