Getting towed in San Francisco is an expensive ordeal. For Rodin Roohipour — a 15-year-old too young to even get his driver’s license — it was fodder for a weekend project.

Inspired by local tech prankster Riley Walz, Roohipour, who lives in Los Angeles, vibe-coded an app (opens in new tab) that maps the location of San Francisco tow trucks in real time and launched it Tuesday between his morning classes at Chadwick School in Palos Verdes. 

By the time he’d finished lunch, the app had been effectively killed after Autura, the company that runs the city’s tow database, walled off its data feed. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency denied having any role in the shutdown of Roohipour’s app but last year shut down an app from Walz that tracked parking enforcement, citing safety concerns.

The Standard spoke with Roohipour about his motives for building the app, its swift demise, and what he plans next.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you build the app?

I was just sitting in my bed bored on Saturday night and scrolling Twitter. I saw Riley’s post, or someone talking about Riley’s post. I started thinking about ideas that I had, and I’m like, “OK,  it’d be cool to use city data, because I’ve been into coding, been into data since I was like 8 or 9 years old. So I started thinking about, what could I do that would be, like, a cool representation to show that and, what might the people on Twitter like?

After some digging through Google and finding city websites, I landed on towing. The data was publicly accessible back then, at least out there. And, I just went ahead and built it overnight. The gist is that I just went through a few cool ideas because I just wanted to build something. I was bored on the weekend, and I kind of just landed on that.

Why San Francisco?

Well, I’ve kind of been into tech for about a year now, and most people know that San Francisco is the tech city of the world. I flew there last summer. While L.A. is cool for a lot of stuff, I think this would resonate a lot more with people in San Francisco. And I’m pretty sure that San Francisco is kind of notorious for bad towing.

Why are you interested in tech? 

It’s a world where anyone can do anything they want, and things are kind of really ahead of their time. You have companies who are doing big things with AI and have 500 founders there who raised over $1 million who are under 23, 25 years old. There’s a culture that you can just do things. You can just make apps. So I think that’s partially why I’m connected to it.

Some have criticized the app over its potential to expose tow truck drivers (opens in new tab) to harm or assault. What do you think of this criticism?

I’m not surprised that it got shut down. I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong in saying it’s dangerous, you know. I think there’s a perspective. 

Do you find the shutdown concerning?

I don’t think that it’s very fair. Now, I’m not saying what the city did was wrong, but I think it’s just a bit ironic that, you know, the city has the data completely publicly, but when someone tries to make it look cleaner, they’ll take it down.

I completely understand the safety point. But I think there’s also just one aspect about how the city doesn’t really like when people come and try to take over their job, in a sense.

Are you going to try to bring the app back?

I’m not gonna name names, but there’ve been a few people in my DMs who are giving me access to their products that help you get data from the internet and stuff like that. There’s also been a few people who are just giving me general suggestions of how to get it back up.

What’s the next project?

A few that are on my mind right now are a map of New York City noise complaints and a map of free public bathrooms, maybe in Los Angeles. One I came up with myself, and the other I saw in the comments of my post. But I’ll just be coming up with new things as I go.