SF: Adding Insult to Injury

Cars are ticketed $63 for not curbing wheels when parked on San Francisco hills.

The goal is safety first:

The purpose, according to the [San Francisco Municipal Transit] Agency, is to keep parked cars from rolling into traffic if they were hit or if their brakes were to fail.

The obvious tip for visitors to our fair City is: before calling the cops because your windows have been smashed and your stuff taken, curb your wheels. Your car shouldn't be rolling into traffic.

Stolen-car owners shouldn't feel neglected by the SFMTA either. [bold added]

Between May 1 and Sept. 17, over 2,000 vehicles were reported stolen to the Police Department. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, or SFMTA, had, as of Sept. 26, ticketed 411 of those while they were still officially considered stolen, issuing fines totaling nearly $70,000, according to a Chronicle analysis of public records. Some vehicles were written up multiple times.

San Francisco parking officers could locate stolen cars, though it would require a technological fix that accounts for the fact that non-police agencies generally don’t have direct access to law enforcement databases.

....Fifteen years ago, SFMTA parking officers used handheld ticketing devices that included auto-theft information from a city crime database, the Chronicle reported at the time. The department no longer has that automated capability, [SFMTA spokesperson Stephen] Chun said.

High-tech San Francisco had better tech 15 years ago. It's just coincidental that parking fines on stolen vehicles due to the lack of cross-referencing have turned out to be a moneymaker.