About the data

What a square means

Each square covers about 360 feet (110 meters), roughly one city block. The darker the square, the more reports came from that spot over the years you have selected. As you zoom out, squares merge into bigger ones so the map stays readable.

Every report is a request from a resident or a city worker. Someone saw a car that looked abandoned and told the city. Nobody has checked the reports for this site.

A dark square does not mean a car is there now, or that a car was ever legally abandoned. Only the city can decide that. The car may have been moved, towed, repaired or sold, and the same car may have been reported many times. A street with a long-term parking problem can look the same as a street with many different cars.

What a dot means

Zoom in close and the squares give way to dots. Each dot is one spot, rounded to about 35 feet (10 meters). Reports that fall on the same spot are merged into one dot, and the bigger the dot, the more reports came from that spot. Select a dot to see the months of its reports.

Nothing finer than the rounded spot is on this site, so there are no street addresses and you can't tell reports apart within a dot. A big dot can mean a long-running problem, or that the city recorded one default location for several requests.

Where the reports come from

All three cities publish their 311 requests as open data. This site uses the abandoned-vehicle requests from each.

• San Francisco: SF 311 Cases on DataSF.
• Oakland: Oakland 311 service requests on the city's open data portal.
• San José: San José 311 service requests on the city's open data portal.

The data is imported by hand, so it can be out of date. The date of the latest import is at the bottom of each page. Each city sets its own terms for reusing its data, so check them before you reuse the numbers.

What each square shows

• The number of reports made from that square, in total and for each year.
• The neighborhood the square sits in.
• For San José, how many of the reports came from the “Vehicle Concerns” category (see below).

The year is the year the report was made. Report counts are by square, so two reports a few feet apart are always counted together.

What is left out on purpose

License plates, photos, street addresses, the reporter's name and notes, and anything the city wrote about a particular car never reach this site. Locations are rounded: to about 35 feet when you are zoomed in, and to a square about a block wide when you are zoomed out.

Also left out:

• Requests that were cancelled. This removes about 41,000 Oakland requests.
• Requests with no usable location, or with a location outside the city.
• Follow-up callbacks and large-vehicle parking complaints in San Francisco, which are filed under their own categories.
• Whether a request was open or closed. Cities use the status inconsistently, and San José publishes no closing dates, so it would mislead more than it would tell.

How the cities differ

Each city runs its 311 differently, so don't compare cities by their totals. A city with more reports does not necessarily have more abandoned cars.

• San Francisco changed categories in June 2024. Reports up to 11 June 2024 are in the old “Abandoned Vehicle” category, and later ones are in “Parking Enforcement” with the type “abandoned vehicle”. This site joins the two. The data has no reports for 12 June 2024. Reports fall to about a fifth of the 2019 level in 2020. The city's data does not say why.
• Oakland reports are those described as an abandoned vehicle (including burned vehicles) or an abandoned auto handled by the police. There are far fewer reports before 2019 than after, and about half as many in 2022 as in the years around it. The data does not say why, so treat those years as incomplete.
• San José data starts in May 2017. In March 2024 the city stopped using its “Abandoned Vehicle” category. Since then, reports about vehicles that go to Transportation use a category called “Vehicle Concerns”. This site shows them as a separate part of San José's count, which you can turn off. The city doesn't say that Vehicle Concerns replaces Abandoned Vehicle. It is an inference, based on the dates and on the monthly counts, which carry on at a similar pace. About 18,900 Vehicle Concerns requests that go to other departments are left out.

Neighborhoods

Neighborhood names and outlines come from a public collection of city neighborhood boundaries on GitHub. They are approximate. The collection does not say where each outline came from, so they may not match the boundaries the city uses. Squares are assigned to the neighborhood that holds their center. A square that straddles a border goes to one side.

Neighborhoods have different sizes and populations, and the three cities draw their outlines in different ways. A neighborhood at the top of the list has more reports, not necessarily more reports per resident.

What is not here

• Reports made some other way, such as a call to the police, a tow company or a neighbor. Only 311 requests that reached the open data are counted.
• Whether a car is still there. The map shows reports, not cars, and an old square may show a problem that was solved long ago.
• A count of cars. Ten reports are not ten cars. They show where people called the city, which also depends on who knows how to report, who trusts the city to respond, and which streets the city patrols.
• The rest of the Bay Area. This version covers San Francisco, Oakland and San José only.

If you see an abandoned vehicle

Use your city's 311. Each city has its own form, and you can usually report from a phone.

• San Francisco 311
• Oakland: abandoned vehicles
• San José 311

Please do not touch, move or tamper with the vehicle. If a vehicle is blocking traffic, leaking fuel, or you think someone is in danger, call 911.

This site cannot take reports. Nothing you do here is sent to a city.

Corrections

If a report looks wrong, the best fix is at the source: tell the city through its 311. This site picks up changes the next time the data is imported. If something on this site is wrong, such as a number, a neighborhood name or a date, please let the person who sent you the link know.

Credits

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, with tiles by CARTO. When the street map can't load, the plain map draws street lines and street names from the U.S. Census Bureau's TIGER/Line files, which are public domain. The map uses Leaflet. The typeface is Public Sans. Neighborhood outlines are from the open Click That ’Hood collection.

This is an independent project. It is not run or endorsed by the City and County of San Francisco, the City of Oakland, the City of San José or any government agency.