San Jose’s new city team dedicated to cracking down on parked vehicles with expired registrations towed more than 500 of the vehicles in the first 12 weeks of enforcement — part of an overall effort to improve safety and keep neighborhoods clean.
The Expired Registration Enforcement Program is one of several new initiatives launched this year to quell some of the most frequent parking-related complaints and to limit the impacts of vehicles with people living inside them parked on neighborhood streets.
Following an outreach period from July 1 to Aug. 17, when the parking officers issued approximately 3,000 warning notices, data released by the city through Nov. 8 showed 552 citations issued and 527 vehicles towed.
“I am optimistic about our new approach to these unregistered vehicles,” District 5 Councilmember Peter Ortiz said at Monday’s Transportation and Environment Committee meeting. “I am encouraged by the new strategies (and) the new hiring that is going to be starting in the new year to improve this function … I want to make sure that areas like District 5, District 3, District 7 and their residents see relief of this over-concentration because it’s not sustainable.”
Parking enforcement, including against RVs and lived-in vehicles clogging public streets, has long been a source of frustration for elected officials and residents.
During the last fiscal year, the city received more than 32,000 vehicle complaints through its San Jose 311 app.
A vehicle inventory conducted by the city’s Department of Transportation between August and October 2024 also found over 2,000 oversized or lived-in vehicles on public streets, with approximately 36% of them showing expired or unverifiable tags.
In January, the city began taking steps to reduce the impacts of RVs by launching the Oversized and Lived-in Vehicle Enforcement Program, or OLIVE, which created more than 30 temporary tow-away zones near schools, parks, waterways and interim housing sites.
Along with expanding the OLIVE program to up to 50 sites and creating a supplemental initiative for lower priority and hotspots that pop up, the city rolled out other programs aimed at moving some of these vehicles off the streets or, at a minimum, forcing the operable ones to move more frequently and follow parking laws.
Among the new programs the city budgeted for this year was a pilot program to create tow-away zones in street-sweeping areas. Despite only 13% of its curb miles being lined with permanent parking restrictions, the city issued roughly 65,000 citations last year.
Another major initiative was a vehicle buyback program to remove dilapidated RVs from circulation. During the abatement of Columbus Park, which began in August, San Jose purchased 69 vehicles for $2,000 each in gift cards.
With a bevy of vehicles out of compliance, city officials touted the need for accountability when they announced the creation of the Expired Registration Enforcement Program. An analysis of DMV data showed over 4,200 vehicles in the city had registrations that had been expired for six months or longer.
Although the city has the right to tow vehicles with registrations lapsed for at least six months, the city’s Department of Transportation division manager, Arian Collen, said it is using a tiered approach to its enforcement, choosing to tow vehicles with registrations expired for more than one year.
Out of the 527 tows during the first 12 weeks of enforcement, nearly 94% were identified as personal vehicles, while RVs or trailers made up 4%.
The first phase of the program patrolled approximately 30% of the streets, primarily near former OLIVE sites, emergency interim housing communities and supported parking locations.
Collen said that patrol coverage will increase in 2026 when three more officers join the expired registration team, bringing the total to 6.
Though San Jose has increased its overall parking compliance staff from 48.5 to 55.5 full-time employees to address these issues, transportation officials say it is still understaffed compared to other Bay Area municipalities.
“This represents more than a 14% increase in personnel, but even with this growth, the (parking compliance unit) continues to operate at a very lean level,” Department of Transportation deputy director Heather Hoshii said. “Given the geographical size of San Jose, this limited staffing significantly affects the unit’s ability to provide on-demand, frequent and extensive enforcement city-wide … We are operating at roughly .31 officers per square mile. To put that into perspective, Oakland operates at about 1.25 officers per square mile, Berkeley at two and San Francisco at 7.32. Even though our team is small, it is incredibly effective.”