WASHINGTON, D. C. (Thursday, September 20, 2018) –– Parking tickets and parking ticket revenue have plummeted from the zenith to the nadir, the two poles of the horizon, in all the annals of ticket writing and ticket issuance in the nation’s capital. As proof, the city’s corps of meter mavens toting handheld parking ticket zap-guns and balancing their ticket writing prowess on Segways, issued nearly 600,000 fewer tickets last year than they did six years earlier, notes AAA Mid-Atlantic. As a result, the revenue generated by parking citations has sunk by one-third since then, a comparative shortfall of 31 million dollars.

It is a battle of wits and technology. In the “blue corner,” parking enforcement officers wielding hand-held electronic issuance devices and snapping photos of parking violations. In the opposite corner, motorists adroitly using mobile devices and mobile parking solutions or platforms in the city to outsmart ticket writers, to beat the meter, to pay for on-street parking, or to book spots in downtown parking garages and parking lots.

“Since Fiscal Year 2011, the number of parking tickets issued in the District declined in six out of seven years, with the exception of fiscal 2015, which saw a slight uptick in parking tickets over FY 2014,” said John B. Townsend II, AAA Mid-Atlantic’s Manager of Public & Government Affairs. “This decade the District has issued 14.2 million parking tickets and collected $663 million in parking ticket revenue. Parking ticket revenue continues to precipitously drop in Washington, D.C., as parking enforcers issue fewer citations. Parking ticket revenue in the District is organic. It is warp and woof of the DNA of the city’s general fund.”

The steep falloff in parking tickets and parking ticket revenue continues to punch holes in the District’s budget, as more and more motorists use their smartphones in the “square off” to pay for parking and extend their parking sessions remotely with their fingertips. Fiscal Year 2017 marks the third year in a row the city has witnessed a drop in the number of parking tickets issued. A year earlier, total parking ticket output dropped to 1.5 million citations in Fiscal Year 2016, from 1.7 million the previous budget cycle. Parking ticket revenue dropped by nearly eight million dollars during the previous budget cycle, from $68,289,233 during Fiscal Year 2016 to $60,650,182 in FY 2017. AAA Mid-Atlantic obtained the data through a FOIA request.

For the sake of comparison, the District issued 597,676 fewer parking citations in FY 2017 than it did in FY 2011. Since Fiscal Year 2010, the District has issued 14,237,853 parking citations and collected $662,615,890 in parking ticket revenue, AAA Mid-Atlantic calculates. Among the nation’s cities and towns, the District is not alone in seeing a big drop in parking ticket issuance and potential fine revenue. It is also happening in Salt Lake City. Parking enforcement officers are writing fewer tickets in some cities, including Columbus, Ohio, and St. Paul, Minnesota, but that doesn’t seem to be hurting their budget projections.

The City of Chicago issues “more than 3 million tickets each year for a wide range of parking, vehicle compliance, and automated traffic camera violations, from $25 citations for broken headlights to $250 tickets for parking in a disabled zone,” according to Mother Jones. Those tickets in Chicago generated “nearly $264 million in 2016, or about 7 percent of the city’s $3.6 billion operating budget.” New York City reportedly “raked in $545 million in parking ticket fines” in 2016. The New York Daily News reports: “Parking tickets accounted for 55% of all fines, bringing in $545 million for city coffers, a $32 million spike since 2012.”

Motorists spend an average of 65 hours per year searching for a precious place to park in Washington, D.C., which is often harder than finding a needle in a haystack, compared to a nationwide “average of 17 hours and about $97 per year,” according to a study by INRIX, Inc. The search for a parking space and the high cost of parking are the bane of existence for District residents, workers and its 20.8 million annual visitors. As to the search, only six percent of on-street parking spaces in the city are metered. As to the price tag, the average annual cost of parking in the District is $4,218, according to research conducted by AAA.

                                                                          Annual Parking Costs by City

To ascertain this, AAA evaluated parking costs from three sources – Parkopedia, ParkMe and City Observatory. For some urbanites, parking costs are an important transportation consideration as annual costs range from $706 in Phoenix to as high as $8,088 in New York, explains AAA. The average parking costs across the 20 urban areas included in this study is $2,728.

In October 2015, the District implemented a five-dollar-increase, constituting a 20 percentage change, in expired parking meter fines in premium demand zones, and a similar increase in fines for illegally parked vehicles in residential areas. Six months later in June 2016, the Council imposed a rate increase at all parking meters in the District, as the rate for on-street parking increased to 50 cents for every 13 minutes. The hourly rate for all parking meters in the District increased to $2.30 per hour from $2 per hour in the central business district, a 15 percent uptick, and from 75 cents an hour to $2.30 hourly in the District’s so-called “normal demand parking zones.” The latter represented a 203 percent increase.

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AAA provides automotive, travel and insurance services to 57 million members nationwide and nearly 78,000 members in the District of Columbia.  AAA advocates for the safety and mobility of its members and has been committed to outstanding road service for more than 100 years.  The not-for-profit, fully tax-paying member organization works on behalf of motorists, who can now map a route, find local gas prices, discover discounts, book a hotel and track their roadside assistance service with the AAA Mobile app for iPhone, iPad and Android. For more information, visit  https://aaa.com