I should have clarified - I only found his business through that list because I noticed his vanity license plate HPPYPPS, which corresponded to a business named Happy Pipes Plumbing which I subsequently found on Yelp.

Also, I found out about his van getting towed because I scraped towing records from Autoreturn (the city's main towing provider - lots of corruption around that deal). Autoreturn's website at the time had a query parameter like "?towid=1", so you could increment that to pull all towing records.

I started working on a pretty in-depth data analysis and visualization, similar to what was done here, but I got caught up with my day job and some rock climbing dreams. I handed over all my research to a few local reporters a while back - they were really excited to talk to me in person about it, but I haven't seen anything published since.

Thanks for clarifying! So basically his van kept getting towed and he kept losing business as a result? Presumably it also cost him to recover his vehicle. So in summary, if you got on this list you're just permanently screwed in SF? And you can get on this list by paying a fine twice by accident?

> "?towid=1"

Funnily, incrementing that number in the country I live in would itself be a crime. If the company I did this to found out, they could probably take me to court and win.

A wonderful world we live in. :)

It caused him problems because he didn't think the law applied to him, and got charged a lot of fines due to those violations.

Incurring higher costs than revenue is a common cause of business failures.

More likely is he paid a ticket incorrectly. Someone said he paid the same ticket twice instead of paying each ticket once. Then the city racked up delinquency fines while making little to no effort to inform him of these fines or the outstanding ticket. One day, he gets towed and can't get his van back until thousands of dollars in fines and penalties are paid from a ticket that he thought had been taken care of long ago.