Mapbox

Our verdict on Mapbox

Mapbox did its job quietly on our one map project. Jordan plotted Los Angeles parking tickets on it, then layered officer routes and filters on top, and almost all of the code came from AI coding tools rather than from him.

That is the whole of our experience: one build in October 2025. We didn't discuss Mapbox pricing, styling options or alternatives, so treat this as a build report, not a full Mapbox review.

What we built with Mapbox

Tix LAX (Episode 15): a map of where parking tickets get written across Los Angeles.

• Why: someone on Twitter had posted a live map of San Francisco parking tickets that went viral, and the city kept taking its system down to block it. Jordan wanted to try the same with LA's open data.
• What it shows: ticket locations, each officer's coverage area, an officer leaderboard by tickets and revenue, and filters for vehicle color, violation type, agency and date range.
• What it found: officer 56 led with 329 tickets. Black, white and gray cars get the most tickets, while brown, purple and gold rarely do, though they are also rare colors. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica show up empty because they are separate cities, and expired-meter tickets cluster on Ventura Boulevard.

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

— Jordan Metzner, Episode 15

How we use Mapbox

The steps, from Jordan's walkthrough between 01:38 and 06:11:

1. Find a data source first. LA's parking ticket data is available through Excel exports, queries and APIs via the city's contractor. Jordan had worked with the city's parking data before.
2. Pull a snapshot. He queried the API about a week before recording, so the map shows a fixed window, not a live feed.
3. Plot the points on a Mapbox map of the city. Empty pockets are a quick sanity check. In LA they matched independent cities.
4. Add one view per question. Per-officer coverage, then a leaderboard, then segments by color, violation and agency.
5. Add date range selectors so you can compare periods.
6. Let the coding agents write it. Jordan used Cursor and OpenAI Codex for almost all of it.
7. Read the map like an analyst. Filter to expired meters and you see enforcement concentrated on Ventura Boulevard and a long, quiet stretch between Sherman Oaks and Encino.

Where Mapbox falls short

Our problems were with the data, not the map:

• No live data. LA tickets appear about two days after they're written, so you cannot see where officers are right now.
• Dirty dates. The dataset had tickets dated months in the future, which Jordan put down to officers writing 2026 instead of 2025.
• Possible import errors. Jordan said the leaderboard gaps "could be some data discrepancy" in how he brought the data in.

Jordan did not see the delay only as a limit. San Francisco defended blocking its live map on officer safety grounds, and he said the two-day lag probably makes LA's dataset "a little bit safer for officers" too. If you build something similar, check how fresh the data is before you promise users anything live.

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

— Jordan Metzner, Episode 15

Why we liked the project

Sam's take was that it shows how fast you can turn public APIs into a clear picture that helps people decide things. Jordan saw it as giving residents a new way to look at their own city's data, and noted that the ticket revenue on the map looked small for a city the size of Los Angeles.

For another data-heavy dashboard, this one with a census overlay, see Sam's clinical trial site selection dashboard.

Episodes featuring Mapbox

• Episode 15: Tix LAX, the LA parking ticket map built on Mapbox.

FAQ

What did you build with Mapbox?

Tix LAX, a web map of where parking tickets are issued across Los Angeles, with per-officer coverage, an officer leaderboard, and filters for vehicle color, violation type, agency and date range.

Can AI coding tools build a Mapbox app?

Yes. Jordan said he coded almost all of Tix LAX using Cursor and OpenAI's Codex, with Mapbox as the map.

Can you make a live map with Mapbox and city data?

Only if the data is live. Los Angeles parking data runs about two days behind, so Tix LAX can't show where officers are right now the way a viral San Francisco map did.

Is Mapbox good for public data projects?

It worked well for ours. We only used it for this one build in October 2025 and did not discuss pricing or alternatives on the show.