About 784,000 parking tickets were issued in Los Angeles in the first five months of 2024, 6.4% more than the same period last year.
As always, there are penalties for not putting fare into the meter or not reading the signs clearly (which can be confusing). More than 90 percent of tickets this year were for fines of $50 or more.
But there’s a silver lining for drivers: The number of traffic tickets remains lower than it was pre-COVID-19. About 890,000 tickets were issued between Jan. 1 and May 31, 2019. Two years prior, there were more than 945,000 tickets issued during the same period, according to data published by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation.
The decline from historically high levels is due in part to vacant positions at the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Crosstown has previously written about the large number of vacant positions in the Traffic Enforcement Division. According to an analysis by the City Comptroller’s Office, the department has 18.6% of its positions open (which includes all positions, not just Traffic Enforcement) as of December 30, 2023.
That situation is likely to continue: The City Council recently approved Mayor Karen Bass’ spending plan to cut 1,700 vacant positions from the city’s payroll as part of an effort to close the budget deficit.
What’s good for drivers is bad for the government’s finances: Crosstown previously reported that the city makes less money from parking tickets than it covers the costs of operating its traffic enforcement department.
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The city expects to bring in $110 million in parking fines this fiscal year, according to budget data, or 0.86% of the $12.82 billion the city expects to bring in this year.
But four years ago, parking ticket fines brought in $140.5 million in revenue. In 2014, the city brought in $165.2 million in revenue from parking tickets, which accounted for 2.03% of the city’s total revenue of $8.12 billion that year.
A cleaner windshield
For much of the 2010s, the city issued more than 2 million parking tickets each year. That changed with the onset of the pandemic, when many parking restrictions were relaxed in the spring of 2020. About 1.5 million tickets were posted to car windshields that year.
The numbers have fluctuated since then, with last year’s 1.78 million citations lower than the 2022 number.
The peak in monthly parking tickets occurred just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit: 206,000 tickets were issued in January 2020, according to LADOT data.
Monthly citations over the past year have generally ranged from 140,000 to 160,000.
Not surprisingly, more densely populated areas receive the most tickets: Between Jan. 1 and May 31 of this year, Downtown San Francisco issued more than 77,000 tickets, more than double the number issued in Hollywood, the next highest rate.
Thursday is the busiest day for tickets in Los Angeles, with 152,000 tickets issued on Thursdays this year, according to data from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, and just under 35,000 tickets issued on Sundays.
Methodology: We looked at parking ticket data from Los Angeles Department of Transportation from January 1, 2014 to May 31, 2024. Calculations use data publicly available from Los Angeles Department of Transportation. From time to time, LA Department of Transportation updates past reports with new information or reclassifies past reports. These revised reports do not necessarily automatically become part of the public database. We also looked at City of Los Angeles budget data.
To learn more about our data, click here or email us at [email protected]