Los Angeles Parking Ticket Map

Tix LAX is a map of where parking tickets get written across Los Angeles. Jordan built it from the city's open parking data, with per-officer coverage maps, an officer leaderboard, and filters by car color, violation type, agency and date. He coded almost all of it with Cursor and OpenAI Codex on Mapbox, pulled the data about a week before recording, and showed it in Episode 15 (October 3, 2025). He didn't give a build time.

Why we built it

About a week earlier, someone on Twitter posted a live map of San Francisco parking tickets showing in real time where enforcement officers were. It went viral, and Jordan said the city took its system down several times to block access, citing officer safety. Residents loved it.

Jordan wanted to try the same in LA, where the city publishes good data. He'd worked with LA city data before, including parking data at LAX. His larger point: residents should be able to look at their own city's data in new ways.

The stack

• City of Los Angeles parking ticket data: available through Excel, queries and APIs.
• Mapbox: the map.
• Cursor with OpenAI Codex 5: wrote nearly all the code.

And then, yeah, using Mapbox here, I coded almost all of it using cursor and codex.

— Jordan Metzner, Episode 15

How we built it, step by step

1. Pull the data. Jordan queried the city's API.
2. Plot every ticket on a Mapbox map of LA.
3. Add officer views. Pick an officer to see the area they cover, plus a leaderboard by tickets and revenue.
4. Segment it. Vehicle color, violation type (such as expired meters), agency, and date-range selectors.
5. Code it with Cursor and Codex 5.

How it turned out

The map works, and the patterns are interesting:

• Officer 56 led with 329 tickets; most officers wrote around 150 in the period. Jordan cautioned that some of this could be from how he imported the data.
• Car colors. Black, white and gray get the most tickets, brown, purple and gold the fewest.

You know, brown, purple, and gold cars just don't get tickets very often, but they're also, you know, not very popular car colors.

— Jordan Metzner, Episode 15

• Gaps. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica show no tickets because they're separate cities. A stretch between Sherman Oaks and Encino had almost none.
• Ventura Boulevard is where expired-meter tickets cluster. Sam's read: park a couple of blocks off Ventura.

Jordan also noticed the revenue per officer was small for a city LA's size, and recalled reading that the parking division loses money. His question: is this even efficient?

What we'd do differently

• Know the data's limits first. LA's data runs about two days behind because officers upload tickets later, so a live map like San Francisco's isn't possible.

So about a two day delay in seeing the data online, which means, like, not ability to get live data.

— Jordan Metzner, Episode 15

• Clean the dates. The dataset had tickets dated in the future, likely an officer typing 2026 instead of 2025.

Choosing between coding agents? See Claude Code vs OpenAI Codex. Another LA build of ours is the weather and time app for Los Angeles and Nashville.

FAQ

Is there a Los Angeles parking ticket map?

Jordan built one, Tix LAX, from the City of Los Angeles parking ticket data. It shows where tickets are issued, where each officer writes them, an officer leaderboard, and filters by car color, violation type, agency and date.

Is LA parking ticket data available through an API?

Yes. Jordan said the city's data is available through Excel downloads, queries and APIs via the company that holds the city's contract. It runs about two days behind, so live officer tracking isn't possible.

Which car color gets the fewest parking tickets in LA?

In Jordan's data, black, white and gray cars got the most tickets and brown, purple and gold the fewest, but those are also the most and least popular colors, so it doesn't mean a brown car avoids tickets.

How do you build a map app with Cursor and Codex?

Jordan queried the city API, plotted tickets on a Mapbox map of LA, and coded almost all of it in Cursor with OpenAI's Codex 5.