When are Parking Tickets being Issued in Berkeley?

A data journalism project by Ali DeFazio

  

Over the summer, a coworker of mine told me he had a database of all parking tickets issued in Berkeley over the last 10 years. Like any respecatble agent of chaos, my first thought was, "I HAVE to map this." (to see where not to park, of course.)

Not so fast.

This coworker, Jason Paladino, also mentioned the location data is "pretty messy." Try practically nonexisent. The majority of the time, the ticketing officers only noted one street name (i.e. Bancroft Way... and that's it). However, time data proved to be valuable.

Are more tickets issued in the morning or afternoon? What about over the summer or winter? Are Wednesdays particulary bad days to park? This project will answer all these questions (and hopefully a few more).

But first...

  

Types of Violations

In 2018, 90 different types of parking tickets were issued. Tickets ranged from facing the wrong way on a one way street (10 cases) to not paying a meter (almost 24,000 cases).

That's a lot of different tickets, though. An easier way to look at the data is to categorize the types of violations.

How are tickets issued by month?

May was the month with the most tickets issued, with 13,593 violations. December took the cake for least with 5,830 tickets. And are more tickets issued over the summer or winter? Summer.

How are tickets issued by day?

No, Wednesdays are not a bad day for tickets. Tuesdays, however... Sundays (to no one's surprise) is the day with the least amount of tickets.