Drivers paid using SF’s new high-tech parking systems. They were ticketed anyway.

As San Francisco rolls out new parking meter technology, some drivers find themselves paying to park, but still ending up with a ticket.

“Intuitively, you park, get out of your car and walk up to a meter and you pay it,” said East Bay resident Karl Carstensen, who was ticketed on Sept. 13 for an expired meter. “It’s the one right in front of your car.”

Carstensen, for example, had parked next to a pay station at 435 Brannan St. and purchased four hours’ parking. Yet, he was ticketed an hour later.

It’s unclear how frequently San Francisco parking control officers ticket drivers whose parking has not expired. 

What is clear is that there are at least two problems at hand. One is a technology issue with a minority of the new pay stations. The other is an online payment system that’s susceptible to human error, and subject to San Francisco’s unforgiving ticketing protocol.

Within an afternoon, Mission Local found five drivers who were ticketed for expired meters while they were legally parked. All of them had proof that the time they paid for hadn’t yet expired. 

And yet, none of the drivers found it easy to get their tickets dismissed. Three still owe the city money.

“I presented a copy of the citation, a copy of the receipt I got from the pay station showing the time stamp, and I had bank documentation to back it up,” Carstensen said. “And they still denied my online protest.”

His ticket was eventually rescinded, but not until a month later.

A technology ‘latency’ issue

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency told Mission Local that Carstensen was ticketed due to an “extremely rare” latency issue, a delay between a payment being made, and then being registered in an officer’s handheld device. 

In Carstensen’s case, the delay was evidently long enough to result in a ticket.

When informed of the SFMTA’s rationale by Mission Local, Carstensen replied “that sounds like total horseshit.”

Carstensen said this reason did not come up during a hearing he had with the SFMTA regarding his ticket.

Rather, in an email he shared with Mission Local, the hearing officer determined that Carstensen had paid for the wrong meter.

That would seem unlikely, since Carstensen had, after all, parked next to a pay station and then paid into it. 

And if latency was an issue, it was an issue of at least 52 minutes — an awfully long delay for the parking control officer’s machine not to be notified that a payment had been made. Many people park, pay for the meter, and then drive off in far fewer than 52 minutes. 

“That would mean an hour after I’d been parked there, the parking attendant still had no record of my payment in the system,” Carstensen said. “An hour of latency should be unacceptable. They should cease issuing citations for expired parking immediately if they’re experiencing equipment that has an hour of latency time.”

He added, “You can’t have latency of an hour if you’re allowing people to park for less than an hour; you’re always going to get a ticket if an officer comes by and checks it. I think that’s B.S.”

The SFMTA did not respond to an inquiry about the contradictory information at press time. 

The agency said it’s working to resolve the latency issue. It added that Carsensten’s issue was not due to signage differences, as he had proposed.

It’s possible that Carman Lam, a college student who works as a waitress at the Grand Nightclub in SoMa, was impacted by the same latency issue. 

On Oct. 29, several minutes before her 3 p.m. shift, she paid into a parking pay station near 625 Bryant St. The four-hour time limit meant that her parking expired at 6:55 p.m., so she returned at around 6:30 p.m. She had already been ticketed.

 “It’s pretty upsetting,”  she said.

Location confusion

Three times, Miguel Vargas has been hit with an $89 ticket when he still had money on the meter. 

Vargas got his first ticket after using the Pay-by-Phone system on Berry Street on Aug. 26. On Sept. 3, he was ticketed again before his paid time elapsed. Then, on Nov. 29, it happened again.

“It’s very unfortunate, and also very frustrating. I do pay the meter via ‘Pay-by-Phone,’ to go to work, only to come back to my car with a ticket when my meter was still running,” Vargas said. “It’s very tiring. I am doing my due diligence as a citizen by paying, only to still get ticketed.”

The SFMTA told Mission Local that in Vargas’ August and September tickets, he was fined because he paid for the wrong parking location through Pay-by-Phone. Vargas is certain he used the correct location, but it was his word against the parking control officer’s.

These instances show that the Pay-by-Phone system is at least somewhat prone to potential human error — and, when it happens, it’s the members of the general public who’ll pay the price. If either a driver, or a parking control officer, enters one digit of an eight-digit code incorrectly and isn’t careful, the driver can be ticketed regardless of whether they paid or not. 

This important code is called the location number, which drivers can find printed nearby at a pay station or a parking meter. Drivers enter this code into their phones when paying for parking through Pay-by-Phone, which requires them to call, download the application or go to the website on their phone and enter their location number, license plate and card information.

The parking control officer on Aug. 26 provided a different location from the one Vargas punched in, resulting in a ticket even though Vargas paid full price. The SFMTA told Mission Local that it appeared the ticket was issued correctly.

And here, the ticketing protocol is unforgiving: According to the SFMTA, this is how things should work — and, if Vargas’ tickets are anything to go by, the SFMTA has shown that it will take its employees’ word over a driver’s. 

This type of issue is rare for Pay-by-Phone as a whole, which states that it serves more than 60 million users across 10 countries in North America and Europe. Adam, a customer service representative for Pay-by-Phone, said he hears of the issue maybe two or three times out of an estimated 300 to 400 calls for assistance per week.

Instead of checking each block for the license plates that paid for that specific block, which officers typically do, multiple drivers in San Francisco pointed to what appeared an obvious solution: Why not check license plates for parking payments altogether? 

To drivers such as Cody G., who was ticketed during his parking reservation on Nov. 11, this solution seemed obvious.

Cody had paid for parking via Pay-by-Phone, but one digit of the printed location number on his parking meter had been scratched out. He guessed the digit incorrectly and got ticketed.

“You theoretically entered your license plate into a machine,” he said, adding that he has used Pay-by-Phone many times in Bay Area cities such as San Mateo and Redwood City, where he has never had issues. “The city should be like, ‘Oh, this person paid but just went to another’” parking station.

The SFMTA said parking control officers do not routinely check if license plates have been entered by drivers citywide who have already paid.

“If [parking control officers] also were required, when enforcing a block, to check the lists of paid license plates for several other nearby blocks, it would slow them down significantly,” the SFMTA told Mission Local. 

Meanwhile, Vargas’ third ticket, dated Nov. 29, showed what appears to be an error from the parking control officer.

The location numbers provided by Vargas and the parking control officer, again, diverged. However, both numbers, when entered into the Pay-by-Phone system, bring up the same block. 

It was dismissed on Nov. 30, but only following a Mission Local inquiry.

Vargas’ other two tickets remain. And, due to late penalties, he now owes $400.

“It’s very unfortunate, because I’m a working-class man,” he said. 

Protesting: Difficult and time-consuming

Karl Carstensen’s ticket was eventually dismissed, but not before he spent five to six hours figuring out how to protest, collecting evidence, having his initial protest denied by SFMTA and, finally, scheduling a virtual hearing and attending it. 

“If you paid, and you’re trying to do the right things, and you’re being an upstanding citizen and you still get a ticket, you feel really helpless,” Carstensen said. “I bet what’s happening is, a lot of people don’t want to deal with it, because they can’t fight City Hall, so they’re just going to pay it and move along.”

Despite sending evidence that showed they were still paying for parking when ticketed, Lam and Cody’s online protests were both denied. 

When Cody followed up on his protest, the SFMTA abruptly rescinded his ticket and called the dismissal a “courtesy.” Meanwhile, Vargas said that, between his two restaurant jobs, he simply couldn’t make the time to protest all three tickets.

Roseanne, another resident who was ticketed while still paying for parking through Pay-by-Phone, shelled out the $89 after her online protest was denied. This, she said, was $89 less she could send to her family in the Philippines. 

“I could fight it in court, but I’d have to take off work,” she said.