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Parking tickets are a matter of course in New York City. Whether unloading a moving truck, parking at a faulty meter, or idling while you run into the store, everybody gets them.
As of June, 2020, there were a whopping 51.6 million outstanding parking tickets. That includes camera tickets, since the state of New York considers camera violations a form of non-moving violation.
How much does NYC make in parking ticket fines?
In fiscal year 2019 alone, New York City issued more than 11.4 million parking tickets. That’s an average of 1.3 tickets for every person living in the city. It’s also about 31,233 parking tickets issued every day—or 2.8 tickets every second. Drivers typically contest about 39% of those tickets, but only around 11% are ever dismissed.
Numbers from the NYC Comptroller’s office in 2015 show the city collected $565 million from parking tickets. In all, there were around 9 million parking tickets issued. Of those 9 million tickets, courts dismissed 11% and upheld the other 8 million.
$565 million from 8 million tickets averages out to around $70.63 per ticket.
If courts also dismissed 11% of parking tickets issued in 2019, 10.1 million tickets would remain. At an average of $70.63 per ticket, that amounts to more than $713 million—a 26% increase from 2015.
The city of New York depends on these fines for maintaining much of its budget. The 2015 budget for the NYC Department of Finance (DoF) was $249 million. From parking tickets alone, the DoF brought in more than twice what it spent.
How is coronavirus affecting the number of parking tickets issued?
As of June of fiscal year 2020, NYC has already issued more than 7.8 million parking tickets. Until March, the city was averaging well over one million tickets each month. The COVID-19 pandemic put a quick stop to that.
As the chart above shows, the number of parking tickets issued dropped 62% between March and May. That change came immediately after the governor ordered roughly 3.7 million workers to shelter in place. Nearing the end of the second quarter, there have been fewer than one million total parking tickets.
A trend line analysis will cast yet more light on this dilemma. Between December 2019 and March 2020, NYC policy enforcers issued an average of 1.023 million tickets each month. That trend should have continued through to the end of the year.
Instead, data show a steep decline in the number of parking tickets issued each month. From March to April, parking ticket issuance dropped by 41.6%. From April to May, parking ticket issuance dropped by 35.2%.
Though the decline seems to be slowing, the limited data available shows the potential for the decrease from May to June to be approximately 29.8%.
That would mean a total of 1.2 million parking tickets issued this quarter—only 39% of the previous quarter.
How much income will NYC lose to decreased parking ticket issuance?
We will assume that the 11% average rate of dismissal applies this year as well. If so, courts will dismiss around 349,000 parking tickets issued in the first quarter of 2020 and uphold the remaining 2.8 million. At an average cost of $70.63, that amounts to slightly less than $198 million.
Given the monthly average for parking ticket issuance, there should we could have expected courts to issue 3.1 million tickets in the second quarter. If courts were to dismiss 11% of those tickets, that would leave 2.7 million tickets for a total of $190.7 million.
But that’s not the case.
The COVID-19 pandemic decimated the amount of parking tickets issued each month, bringing the total down to 1.2 million. After considering the estimated 11% of court dismissals, around 1.1 million tickets would remain for a total fine revenue of about $77.7 million.
That is a decrease in revenue of $113 million, a loss equal to 43.3% of the NYC DoF’s entire annual budget for 2020.
With signs that the city may soon be reopening, its council people are no doubt wondering what they are going to do to recoup those losses—or where they will cut the budget to account for them.
As COVID-19 continues to decrease the number of commuters out and about, the number of monthly parking tickets may continue to sit well below the previous average.
The fact remains that the city will have lost well over $100 million in parking ticket revenue from this quarter. The millions more lost from reduced traffic ticket issuance also speak to the financial struggle within the city.
