NYC Parking Tickets Fascinating Factoids Will Amaze You

Last Updated on March 7, 2018 by Lawrence Berezin

NYC parking tickets generate buzz and revenue

If you want to ignite some passion in a New York City motorist, ask, “have you ever received an unjust parking ticket?” I promise sparks will fly.
Parking tickets generate roughly $550M in revenue for the City that never sleeps. And, [Tweet “NYC Parking tickets are responsible for 60% of the revenue from all fines.”]

NYC Independent Budget Office shared some fascinating factoids

You gotta check out this excellent blog post, “Is New York ‘Fine’ City?“ It is packed with fascinating factoids (The article was written on August 13, 2013. NYC fiscal year extends from July 1 to June 1). For example:

• • The Bloomberg Administration estimates that revenues from all fines will total $812.5 million in 2014, up about $13 million from last fiscal year
  • Much of the city’s fine revenues come from a single source: parking tickets
  • NYC expects to collect $518.2 million in revenue from parking tickets this year, about $34 million more than last year when Hurricane Sandy forced the city to suspend some parking regulations for a while and city workers who typically focused on issuing parking tickets were redeployed to direct traffic
  • Yet even with the increase in parking ticket revenue expected this year, the total is about $50 million less than the roughly $568 million generated in both 2011 and 2012
  • Despite the Sandy-imposed hiatus, nearly 7.4 million parking tickets were written last year
  • Street vendors are frequent recipients of tickets. Street food vendors received more than 12,800 tickets last fiscal year, although down from nearly 14,000 in 2012
  • Take the thousands of tickets issued to street vendors as an example. An IBO report found, as did a more recent news story, only a small share of the fines are actually collected—not a surprise since fine levels are so out of proportion to the incomes generally earned by vendors. The ticketing may have more to do with public policy and efforts to deter certain behavior or control public space than raising revenue

Is there a convenient way to pay parking tickets from a smartphone?

A smartphone app that’s generating a bunch of buzzes is “TicketZen.”

The idea for TicketZen originated from a tweet by Paul English, the co-founder and former CTO of travel metasearch engine Kayak, in which he wrote, “I want an iPhone app to take a photo of any parking ticket and pay for it from a credit card on file.” Johnson and his team at Boston-based, application design and development shop Terrible Labs took on the challenge of building such an app. The idea stuck and has since been spun out of Terrible Labs — TicketZen’s team is now 11-strong.”

[Via Mashable, “TicketZen Lets You Pay Parking Tickets from your Phone,” Erica Swallow, May 17, 2014]

How much revenue is generated from Red Light, Bus Lane, and Speed Camera Tickets?

A lot!

Check out this interesting interactive chart that shows the amount of revenue generated by each evil ticket. Here are some highlights:

• • Preliminary data for the fiscal year 2014 indicate the city received about $41 million in revenue from camera-generated red-light, bus-lane, and now speeding summonses
  • The budget for this fiscal year, 2015, assumes that revenues from these sources will total about $62 million
  • The proportion of revenue generated by cameras rose from 38 percent in 1999 to 75 percent in 2014

What’s the best way to avoid NYC parking tickets?

You didn’t say, least expensive way, right?
Check out the premium parking space offered in a condo in SoHo for $1M.

The million-dollar parking spots will be offered on a first-come-first-served basis to buyers at the 10-unit luxury apartment building being developed by Atlas Capital Group at Broome and Crosby Streets, itself the former site of a parking lot. At $250,000 a tire, the parking spaces in the underground garage cost more than four times the national median sales price for a home, which is $217,800, according to Zillow.”

The million-dollar parking spots will be offered on a first-come-first-served basis to buyers at the 10-unit luxury apartment building being developed by Atlas Capital Group at Broome and Crosby Streets, itself the former site of a parking lot. At $250,000 a tire, the parking spaces in the underground garage cost more than four times the national median sales price for a home, which is $217,800, according to Zillow.”

[Via NY Times, “Buy Condo, Then Add Parking Spot for $1 Million,” by Michelle Higgins, September 9, 2014]

Commentary

I love this stuff!