A tool to analyze every Philadelphia parking ticket from 2012-17
8,351,719
Tickets issued
$44.47
Average fine
$371.4M
Total fines
Number of tickets and how much they cost
How many tickets the PPA wrote at each fine amount, 2012–2017. Every bar is a citywide count; picking a code changes the numbers above, not this chart. Four prices written once each ($35, $35.95, $54 and $68) are not plotted.
Notes, Sources, and Methodology
Data sources
Tickets: the city’s parking violations record, filtered to tickets issued by the Philadelphia Parking Authority: 8,351,719 tickets between January 2012 and December 2017, worth $371.4 million in fines. About 1.0 million police-issued tickets sit in the same table and are left out; they follow a different enforcement pattern.
Ticket prices: the fine on each ticket, grouped by amount. Over those six years the city charged ten different amounts often enough to chart them, from $26 to $1,001. $301 was the common ceiling. The $1,001 ticket, for a counterfeit handicapped-parking permit, was the outlier: 385 of them, and nothing else at that price. Four amounts — $35, $35.95, $54 and $68 — were each issued once.
Center City: ten violation families cost more inside Center City than outside it, $10 to $25 more depending on the family. An expired meter goes from $26 to $36; blocking a driveway goes from $51 to $76.
Average fine: some codes changed fine level during the six-year window, so a code’s average is a blend of what it cost at different points. The lowest and highest prices are the real ones.
The source is frozen. The last ticket in it was issued on 2017-12-31, so nothing here describes what the PPA charges today.