methodology

for new york city we query the open parking and camera violations dataset published by the nyc department of finance through the city's open-data portal. this is the same public record the city itself publishes for transparency.

live plate lookups query the dataset on demand and cache results for 24 hours. the leaderboard refreshes once per day via a scheduled job.

we compute violation-count cutoffs (p50, p75, p90, p95, p99) from the top of the distribution and place each looked-up plate into a bucket. it's a rough-but-honest rank, not a precise statistical position. a plate in "top 5%" has more violations than at least 95% of plates we've observed.

• ghost plates and defaced plates underreport. nyc speed cameras failed to ticket roughly 22% of offending vehicles in early 2023 due to obscured plates.
• dismissed or overturned violations may still appear in the dataset.
• out-of-state plates are tracked but their rankings may be incomplete because we only see their nyc activity.
• plates change hands. this record is about the plate, not the current owner.

• no user accounts. nothing to log in to.
• we don't store plate searches.
• we don't link plates to names, addresses, or identities.
• rate-limited at 10 lookups per minute per ip to prevent bulk scraping.

this is publicly-available open data published by city governments. we link to the official portals for any disputes or payment. using this data for harassment, stalking, or commercial resale violates our terms.

credible takedown requests are responded to within 48 hours. email billydayan97@gmail.com.