Every New Yorker knows that there are neighborhoods that are touristy, and there are those that for the most part only New Yorkers go to. But how can we measure this? What areas of New York have more people from out of-town than others?

Once again, I turn to parking tickets to answer this question. Yes, for real. I know it seems odd, but here’s the idea. For each neighborhood, I measure the percentage of parking tickets that are given to New York plates relative to tickets from other states.

There are a lot of reasons why this is a vague approximation of visitors. The three that come to mind are that (1) it only measures drivers who get tickets and (2) it considers all New York State drivers to be “local” and (3) some people with out-of-state plates are not visitors. Nonetheless, the data is worth digging into.

In the map below, I color code each precinct, where darker represents a higher percentage of New Yorkers in the parking tickets for that district, and lighter represents a lower percentage:

For the most part, the data shows that the farther you get from Manhattan, the more likely the car belongs to a New Yorker. That result seems fairly intuitive–your average out-of-state visitor is not heading to the outer boroughs as often.

But a little less that ¼ of parking tickets given out in NYC are for cars with out-of-state plates:

For each state, we can also look at the percentage of all tickets in a precinct that are given to cars from that state, and map those results. Each state has a map where the darkest color matches the maximum percentage in any given precinct for that state.

Let’s start with the State that’s closest to NYC, and thus proudly represents the state with the second most parking tickets:

Where do New Jerseyans tend to go? Well, they stick to Manhattan, mostly below 96th st. And they stick around Midtown quite a bit.

How about those from Connecticut (Connecticutians?)

Interestingly, they are more likely to be in the Bronx than their New Jersey counterparts.

Here’s an interesting one: North Carolina.

If you have ever travelled along Atlantic Avenue far enough, you might see some Southern grocery stores around East New York.

Floridians?

This one I can’t figure out. Email me if you have an explanations.

And lastly, Californians.

It appears that Californians are very different from New Jerseyans. (Shock!) They seem to skip Manhattan for the most part and head right to Brooklyn neighborhoods like Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bed-Stuy.

License plates are an interesting way to explore the variety of people coming to many of our New York neighborhoods. You could get much more specific if you mapped each ticket to an address, but for now, I just used the precinct marked on the ticket.

For your enjoyment, I’ve included some of the other commonly ticketed states below:

Data taken from NYC Open Data, Aug 2013-March 2014

Editors Note:

As always, the good people over at reddit have made some nice observations:

“That dark blue for Illinois and Texas in the Bronx is probably from whatever the truckers are doing at Hunts Point.” -Billy_Brubaker

“ All uhaul trucks and car rentals have arizona plates” -diablofreak

Many have also pointed out that states like Florida and Pennsylvania have cheaper car insurance, and so people might register cars there to save money. They point to correlations between precincts with a high fraction of those plates, and less affluent areas. I have not run the numbers on that though.