The good news? The open data really did lead to change. Wellington's discoveries prompted the NYPD to investigate its practices, and it learned that only traffic agents got full training on the pedestrian ramp rule. Patrol officers didn't -- and to no one's surprise, they were the ones writing most of the bad tickets. The force is now making sure that all officers understand the parking law, and it's implementing a digital tracking system to catch these problems before they get out of hand. There's no guarantee that other cities will be quite so willing to expose their inner workings, but this kind of data-driven progress suggests that they should.