Parking in New York City can be equated to the hunger games with over 6 million tickets issued in 2016 alone. Well, today, SpotAngels, an app that aims to solve the parking headache by allowing users to see all available parking options including public, metered and free, in real time, is releasing proprietary data revealing the best and worst areas to park in New York City with the goal of solving the parking dilemma.

The Big Picture

New York City falls second only to San Francisco when it comes to the highest ticket cost in the nation. SpotAngels took a look at what’s going on by numbers across all boroughs and found the following:

Let’s Talk Boroughs

If you’re moving to the city and have a car or have a car and have had enough, SpotAngels has identified the best and worst boroughs to live in. Not surprisingly, Manhattan took the cake of the most ticketed borough. It turns out that Staten Island is the best borough to have a car in with 240,189 tickets compared to Manhattan’s 2.5 million. You will need to take that ferry, though!

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Not if you live in Manhattan!

SpotAngels took a deeper dive to see what was going on in the most ticketed borough in New York City. We found that the top 10 neighborhoods (below) alone generated more than $151 million in fines. The whole of Manhattan generates $200M/ year. This is more than the whole city of San Francisco (124M from our previous research) so safe to say, steer clear of these if you’re looking for a quick, safe parking spot.

The average spot in Manhattan gets 14 tickets/year. This is higher than SF FiDi, which has 11 tickets per spot/year and is the highest in San Francisco. The average revenue per spot is over $1000 ($1093).

Beauty Comes at a Price/ The Breakdown

It’s true, sometimes you have to make sacrifices for beauty and it’s the same in the parking world. SpotAngels took a look at the overall distribution of parking tickets in New York City and it turns out that street cleaning and that pesky alternate side parking is where we all get caught with 43% of overall tickets followed by meter violations. Full breakdown in the graphic below.

And the winners are:

● Stuy town takes the cake for the best place to park with the lowest risk of getting a ticket

● The Upper East Side is a clear winner (or loser) of the worst places to park with the

highest overall revenue per year

● If you’re looking for the easiest place to find a parking spot, Harlem wins for the highest

number of spots in Manhattan

● Battery Park City & Theater District has the highest avg. ticket price, $101. It’s over 20%

higher than the avg. Manhattan ticket

● The Financial District has also the highest incidence of tickets per parking spot, 25 per

spot per year. It means it’s almost 2 times as risky to park there compared to the

average spot in Manhattan (14). It’s 2 ½ times riskier than parking in the riskiest

neighborhood in San Francisco (FiDi, 11)

● Highest revenue per spot award goes to Financial District as well with almost $2,219.

This is twice as much compared to Manhattan avg. revenue per spot ($1,093).

Methodology:

SpotAngels combined NYPD Open Data on NYC parking tickets with their proprietary data on spot location, regulation and average ticket price to analyze the neighborhoods and locations where cars receive the most tickets. Check out their previous research for SF Parking Tickets here.

SpotAngels:

SpotAngels is a free app available on the App Store and the Play Store that was featured by Apple as the parking “hero we’ve needed but never had” and by Google as “Waze for Parking”. It shows you open spots from the community, helps you find free and cheap parking and sends you reminders before alternate side parking.