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What’s the highest amount of parking tickets you’ve gotten in a month for not moving your car in time? Three? Four? Maybe five at the most? You’re not even close to the record.
The Philadelphia Parking Authority keeps track of how long you stay in spots, so you should expect a ticket about one minute after your two-hour limit ends.
Using the city’s Parking Violations data on OpenDataPhilly, we found the data on how many tickets people have racked up for overstaying their welcome in parking spots. For the sake of time and sanity, these numbers are from October 2016 to give you a sense of just how few fucks people give about the PPA in a given month. We used eight tickets as the baseline, because anything less than that is clearly child’s play, as the data show.
[table id=96 /]
An over time limit parking ticket is $26, so eight tickets would cost $208. And 15 tickets—yikes—would be $390. The plate IDs, which we’re partially concealing for the sake of privacy, indicate the number of tickets issued to individual drivers.
Most of the people on the list got their tickets in the same zip code, which means they’re likely racking up tickets close to home or work.
A PPA officer, who requested Billy Penn withhold her name, said people will run towards her asking if they got a ticket already. Her response: Yeah, you got it already.
The officer added that she rarely sees people when issuing tickets, but when she does it’s usually workers trying to move their car in time.
“Sometimes they make it, sometimes they don’t,” the PPA officer said.
This week in parking news
Commuter benefit programs are crowding urban streets, but there’s an alternative
The federal government uses commuter benefit programs, also know as tax subsidies, to get more people driving and (of course) parking in cities. TransitCenter reported that these programs add about 820,000 more commuters, according to CityLab. All those cars on the road result in busier streets and more pollution. Which is why some cities have begun to change their commuter benefit programs to either include public transit or only focus on public transit, according to CityLab. Check out the other cool ways cities, including Philly, have been trying to reverse commuter benefit programs here.
