NYC Parking Violations

Few months ago the City of New York posted Parking Violations Data. The data had over six million observations with several elements like Vehicle details including Plate ID, Plate type, Registration state, details of when the ticket was issued, where it was issued, Violation county and precinct. Because I live in Brooklyn, I was naturally curious to see how parking violations compared amongst boroughs and where Brooklyn stood in particular. On a side note, I was able to find an entry for the parking ticket that I got in September 2013 J.

The data was available in the form of a 1.3 GB CSV file. I tried reading the file directly into R, but for some reason it was unable to read beyond 450,000 rows. I processed the file separately to retain columns of interest and was able to import the whole file. The Issue Date on this data ran from 1970 to way beyond 2014, but I have only analyzed 2013 data here, which was about 63% of the total. A few entries had incorrect Borough ID’s and those have been excluded here (keeping only BX, K, NY, Q, and R). Since there were around 99 different violation codes, I have grouped similar ones (for e.g. Bike lane, crosswalk and sidewalk related violations have been grouped together, similarly, all registration related offences have been grouped together) to be able to see the broad violation categories. I have omitted Violations with negligible number of observations.   

To assess the total amount paid in fines ($) at borough level, I obtained the parking fine amount by violation code from NYC Department of Finance website. The fines are categorized by location as “Manhattan below 96”, which means areas below 96^th St in Manhattan and “All other areas”. Because there is no significant difference between these categories, for the purposes of this analysis, I have used “All other areas”. This data was matched to the parking violation data using violation code.

Percent Violations by County and Category: Almost 13% of violations pertained to ‘No Stopping Zones’ in Manhattan. About 8% offenders were parked in ‘No Parking Zones’ in Brooklyn and over 9% of them were fined for ‘Failure to Display Muni Meter Receipt’ in Manhattan. Two of the top three offending populations are in Manhattan, and the third one is in Brooklyn. 

Out of state offenders (excluding NY registration vehicles): 42% parking violations had NJ registration, 11% from PA and 7% from CT. Surprisingly, FL vehicles account for 5.5% of parking violations. No wonder I see so many FL registered vehicles in my neighborhood. 

Percentage violations by county and fines paid: Circles denote percentage violations and bars denote average fine paid. Borough of Manhattan collected $136 mm in fines in 2013. While the percent violations in Manhattan were 42% of total, the fines they collected were 47% of total. Average fine in Manhattan was $80. Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx were all around the $65 mark, while Staten Island averaged at $74. 

There are many interesting elements in this data. For e.g. as next steps I plan to study seasonality, if any, and the effect of weather on parking violations by looking at temperature, precipitation etc. Violations by type of vehicle (Agricultural, tractor, motorcycle etc.) would also make interesting analysis.