Request 014 — 1/14/2026

Fleet deets and ticket requests

It’s Wednesday! Happy foiaday!

It has been awesome seeing so many people subscribe and share foiaday around, especially among their coworkers and classmates. We’re only on day 14, but I’m hopeful this is serving, at bare minimum, as a source of inspiration. (Especially for the night owls — shout out to the folks who are up just as late as I am when I’ve been sending these.)

Okay. Tonight’s issue is short. I have a few updates, but first, the request du jour: parking and speeding tickets.

But not just any parking or speeding tickets. Ones to city vehicles!

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I’m pulling some of this from the FOIA Advent Calendar, and synthesizing two different days’ worth of requests. There are two main goals with these different requests: one, find out what vehicles are within an agency’s fleet and are being used by employees. Then, find out if those vehicles/employees have racked up fines or tickets based on that info.

It seems straightforward, which always feels like a jinx to admit. I’m sure it’ll be more complicated.

I linked some great examples to the calendar, and I’ll be pulling from them for this request:

• This request about fleets by Brandon Smith to the city of Berwyn…

• …and this one, by John Dyer, to the DC Police about tickets and fines to consular plates.

Here’s the language I’m using. To start, I’m going to request it from Chicago’s Department of Streets and Sanitation, which has a lot of vehicles:

Copies of the following documents:

- A list or inventory of all vehicles owned and in use by Streets and San, including the license plate numbers and/or serial codes for that vehicle. 

- Any and all records pertaining parking fines, speeding tickets, Automated Bus Lane Enforcement tickets and/or DUI arrests given to vehicles with  plates matching those within Streets and Sanitation fleets between 2020 and 2026. Please include any and all records that might establish the number of tickets issued, as well as if any fines resulting from these were paid.

Update-wise: like yesterday, things are relatively benign. But some of the highlights:

• Many extensions and requests to narrow or otherwise clarify the request. That includes places like the University of Illinois system, which wanted clarification on which university of the three I wanted records from about campus police budgets and expenses.

• We did get a no responsive records from the follow-up that I filed with the ILSOS on reasonings given for vanity plate rejections. (Rip.)

• I got an interesting note from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office about narrowing my request about ChatGPT/Copilot use, which indicated there was such a volume of records and conversations that parsing through and possibly redacting information (!) would be unduly burdensome. I’m figuring out how to reply.

It’s all a managing and emailing game at this point, which isn’t terrible. I stick with my advice that I gave to MuckRock a couple years ago about navigating FOIA fees — don’t be a dick:

All the best, and happy filing,

Cam