<\/p>\n
For anyone who has experienced the woes of city car ownership, it\u2019s quite obvious why most New Yorkers don\u2019t have access to a car. According to the Census’ American Community Survey<\/a>, only 44.8% of New York households have access to a car, and just 22.1% of Manhattan households.<\/strong> On top of the astronomical cost of living and having a car, New Yorkers, and Manhattanites especially, are overwhelmingly likely to be a victim of the meter maids. Using NYC’s OpenData Portal to examine calendar year 2015 and 2016, we discovered that the NYC Department of Finance issued over 10 million tickets in 2016<\/a>, or about $715 million in possible revenue (before any late fees).<\/p>\n Issuance of all ticket types is down nearly 15%<\/strong> from the $846 million and 11.7 million tickets issued in 2015<\/a>. Included in the 2016 figures are nearly 425,000 red light camera tickets at $50 each, as well as 1.32 million $50 tickets for speeding in a school zone, which happens to be the second most popular ticket type, just behind street cleaning.\u00a0Red-light camera tickets were also down in 2016, almost 30% from 2015, when over 603,000 were issued.<\/p>\n In order to help renters with cars find an apartment in a neighborhood with easy parking and avoid no-go zones, the RentHop data science team focused on tickets issued to parked cars only<\/strong>. In addition, tickets issued to commercial vehicles, like your regular UPS driver with the stack of tickets on the dash, have been filtered out. The City of New York uses a stipulated fine program<\/a>\u00a0which any company with a commercial vehicle can opt-in to receive reduced fine amounts while giving up the right to contest the tickets. This promises to unfairly make certain neighborhoods\u00a0appear as worse for parking when the data isn’t relevant to our target audience. We’re left with over 5.7 million tickets amounting to nearly $410 million before dreaded late fees,\u00a0<\/strong>down bigly from the 6.98 million tickets and $497 million from 2015.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nThere’s Plenty of Space to Park in Staten Island<\/strong><\/h2>\n