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When Philip Bordallo created a small website in 2015 to help his then-girlfriend avoid parking tickets, he didn’t expect it to become part of Syracuse residents’ daily routines.

Bordallo noticed his then-girlfriend, who attended Syracuse University for graduate school, received multiple parking tickets for violating the city’s odd/even parking rule. Now, over a decade later, his small-scale website, oddeven.org, continues to help people figure out which side of the street to park on, despite Bordallo never living in Syracuse.

“She moved (to Syracuse), and she had a car, and she kept on getting tickets,” Bordallo, a software developer now based in New York City, said. “Immediately, I was like, how can I solve this problem by building something for her?”

When users click on the site, they’re met with a simple display informing them whether the day is odd or even. For Syracuse drivers, it can mean the difference between a free spot and a ticket upwards of $50.

The city’s parking rules require drivers to switch sides of the street for snowplows and street cleaning to access narrow residential roads. Cars must be parked on the designated odd side of the street from 6 p.m. on an odd day to 6 p.m. on an even day, according to the city’s website. At 6 p.m., drivers must switch to the even side.

Exception days, known as “fool’s days,” are at the end of some months when an odd day is followed by another odd day. Fool’s days fall on Jan. 1, Feb. 1, April 1, June 1, Aug. 1, Sept. 1, and Nov. 1. On leap years, March 1 is also a fool’s day.

Although several cities across the country, including Syracuse, use the odd/even parking rule, Bordallo said many people are unaware of it. He said the site receives traffic from other confused users in cities throughout the United States.

“Overwhelmingly, most of the traffic is from Syracuse, but then there’s sporadically other places that have odd/even parking where the site receives traffic,” Bordallo said.

Jason Scharf, deputy director of digital services for the city, said he reached out to Bordallo, asking to implement the functionality on the city’s site. Oddeven’s open-source code and design became public on the city’s municipal violations bureau page around six months ago.

Scharf said the city’s approach to implementing the open-source tool aligns with its broader efforts to make local government services easier to use.

“What we want to see is ‘What are people looking for? Are they finding what they’re looking for on our site? What devices are most people accessing our websites on?’” Scharf said.

Bordallo said he coded oddeven.org as a quick side project, not expecting the site to spread beyond his then-girlfriend and into the broader Syracuse community.

“There was no ulterior motive to get tons of people to start using it,” Bordallo said. “I remember in 2018, there was a point where somebody had posted it on Reddit. It exploded after that. I started getting a lot more users, and of course, the most traffic is always around 5 p.m.”

SU students and city residents have continued to share the site between each other, so no one forgets which side to park on.

Zay Goodrich, an SU junior and Syracuse native, said the odd/even rule has affected many people in his life. He said his family owns several cars, which don’t all fit in their driveway, leading them to park on the street.

“Sometimes my girlfriend would stay over the night, and we wouldn’t know what day it was and then she’d get a ticket,” Goodrich said. “They weren’t cheap either, they ranged anywhere from $50 to $75. It obviously builds up over time.”

Scharf, who also teaches part-time at SU’s School of Information Studies, emphasized the importance of web designs, like oddeven.org, that can have a real-world impact.

“It’s just a push for making it easier for residents to access specific information,” Scharf said.

He said his team used Claude AI to help implement oddeven.org’s functionality into the government site.

Bordallo said he’s heard from residents directly that his site has slowly evolved into a community solution for the Syracuse area. He said he receives lots of emails — some thanking him and others under the impression that he wrote their parking tickets.

Bordallo says he always tries to be and point them in the right direction.

Now living in New York City, Bordallo said his time is mostly spent on his work and family, giving him little time for side projects. However, he said he still sees the value in smaller, community projects as a way to learn and connect.

“I believe that we’re all standing on the shoulders of people before us that’ve done good things for the world,” Bordallo said. “So if you can do something that helps somebody, whether it’s getting out of a parking ticket or making their lives easier, I think it’s really important at the end of the day.”

Published on November 12, 2025 at 11:27 pm