By Livia Mucciolo, Fay Walker, and Aravind Boddupalli
State and local officials are starting to consider the disproportionate effects of criminal legal fines and fees on the lives of families with low incomes—especially Black, Latine, and Native American families. Although policymakers have focused mostly on court and prison fees, most individuals may interact with the criminal legal system via parking tickets, which if left unpaid can turn into lifelong financial burdens. Parking tickets serve as a way to streamline city services like plowing, accessibility to fire hydrants, and street cleaning, but research and news investigations show they can also especially harm people of color and those with low incomes (Brazil 2018). 1 Parking tickets (also called “tickets”) refer to citations issued by police officers or other government traffic officials to inactive motor vehicles for violations of local laws. In this research brief, we analyze three aspects of parking tickets: locations in cities where tickets are issued, the number and dollar amount of tickets assessed, and the types of violations for which tickets are assessed. We look at tickets between January 2018 to December 2019, and we focus on three large cities: Austin, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Portland, Oregon. We selected these cities because of their accessible data and because they were not among the prominent places studied in fines and fees literature so far. Our analysis shows a majority of parking tickets were issued in downtown areas, which typically have a higher density of office buildings, shops, and restaurants. This likely corresponds to the higher concentration of parking meters installed and monitored in commercial corridors. Overall, the largest contributors to parking tickets by type included expired or missing meter receipts and failure to display registration and parking in no-parking and tow-away zones. Because of data limitations, we could not determine the demographic composition of those ticketed.
Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 2023. 26p.