balsama/boston-plate-lookup

Lookup City of Boston tickets by plate number

dev-main 2023-06-04 01:00 UTC

Requires

• php: ^8
• catfan/medoo: ^2.1
• guzzlehttp/guzzle: ^7.4
• ramsey/uuid: ^4.2

Requires (Dev)

• phpunit/phpunit: ^9.5

gpl-2.0-or-later

• Adam Balsam

README

Lookup outstanding Boston Massachusetts parking tickets by license plate.

php ./scripts/lookupPlate.php <plate_number>

What?

Boston doesn't make ticket data public. But it does allow you to look up tickets by entering a license plate and the birthday month/day of the registration holder. There doesn't seem to be any rate limiting on the form, so it's easy to brute force it by guessing the birthday month/day (it doesn't even require a year!)

I use it to look up license plates that show up repeatedly in 311 compliants to justify my ire.

Future plans are for a Twitter Bot that will respond with any found tickets when you tweet a license plate at it. But I imagine the City will figure this out before then and implement some sort of rate limiting on the form. 🤷‍♀️

Usage

This wasn't really meant to be consumed. Look at the Lookup class if you're interested. Or:

1. Clone
2. Composer install
3. php ./scripts/lookupPlate.php <plate_number>

...will get you pretty output. Note that it can take a minute or two to run because we need to brute force the birthday month/day.