I was recently in Berkeley, CA, and saw a car with a receipt on its dashboard showing it had paid for a couple hours of parking. There was also a note that said, “Please stop giving me parking tickets. I clearly pay for parking.” It had an arrow pointing to a massive stack of receipts for parking. Under the windshield wiper was a parking ticket. Either the parking attendants really don’t like that car, or the owner had been illegally plugging the meter.

As it turns out, the city you live in makes a big difference when it comes to getting parking tickets. I used to live in Providence, where you cannot park on the street at night. If a friend were visiting and you didn’t have an extra parking space in your driveway, you could call the city and get the license plate put on a special list so the car wouldn’t be ticketed overnight. But the parking enforcement was so aggressive; leave your car in a spot for 2 hours and 5 minutes, expect a ticket! I’m glad I only owned a bicycle.

To generate this time series comparison, I compiled data from four cities. Each data set represented at least one year of tickets, with N-values between 740k and 6.4M, so the trends are robust. The data were given at one-minute intervals, which I then binned to five-minute intervals to reduce the noise. Of these cities, Milwaukee’s parking ticket timing is certainly the odd one out; about 50% of the citations are made before 6 AM each day. This suggests it has a strict parking law that applies at night, between 2 AM and 6 AM. New York City has a strange pattern in the morning, from 7 AM to noon; tickets are much more frequent near the beginning of the hour and half hour. Then, in the afternoon, the pattern stops. Perhaps a New Yorker can explain this…

Good luck avoiding those parking tickets!

Data sources:

https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Transportation/Parking-Citations/n4ma-fj3m

http://milwaukeedata.org/resource/18992

https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Transportation/Parking-Tickets/yyiw-ypks

https://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/contentonly?vgnextoid=ca20256c54ea4310VgnVCM1000003dd60f89RCRD