Parking Violations in DC
I have very few complaints about living in Washington, D.C., but if I were forced to pick one, it’d be searching for on-street parking. When I found the several public Parking Violations on Open Data DC, I figured I might be able to extract some insights into the best (and worst) blocks to look for a spot during high-demand times.
My original intent was to try to model the parking violations to identify the optimal times and locations of available parking spots near my house. I found the ISSUE_TIME data to be suspicious, and settled on doing a quick exploratory analysis of the data instead.
DC Department of Transportation (DDOT) publishes Parking Violations by Month. I downloaded the past year of monthly datasets and loaded them into R:
Exploring the structure of the dataset with summary:
Exploring missing values: Specifically, violation descriptions, violation locations, and violation time/date:
| Missing Descriptions | Missing Locations | Missing Date | Total Observations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 27,096 | 0 | 0 | 1,353,955 |
Slightly more than 3% of violations have no VIOLATION_DESCRIPTION, however, they are each reported with a VIOLATION CODE, summarized below:
| VIOLATION_CODE | Violations |
|---|---|
| P076 | 26,799 |
| NO VIOL | 278 |
| P071 | 6 |
| P187 | 6 |
| P067 | 2 |
| P178 | 2 |
| P00 | 1 |
| P139 | 1 |
| P189 | 1 |
It seems like P076 is a “ROSA Warning,” which stands for Registration of Out-of-State Automobiles. Some of the other codes were hard to find, although P187 maps to… “ROLLERBLADEINFREEDOM.” Soul Skaters?
For the rest of the exploration, I’ve replaced the missing P076 Violation Description values with ROSA WARNING.
Top 10 violations by description
Parking Violations by Month
Top 10 Violation Locations
| LOCATION | Violations |
|---|---|
| 3200 BLOCK WATER ST NW SOUTH SIDE | 3540 |
| 1300 BLOCK H ST NE SOUTH SIDE | 2930 |
| 1300 BLOCK G ST NW SOUTH SIDE | 2641 |
| 1300 BLOCK CONNECTICUT AVE NW EA | 2494 |
| 1300 BLOCK F ST NW NORTH SIDE | 2372 |
| 1300 BLOCK G ST NW NORTH SIDE | 2279 |
| 900 BLOCK K ST NW NORTH SIDE | 2075 |
| 700 BLOCK 7TH ST NW WEST SIDE | 2039 |
| 1300 BLOCK H ST NE NORTH SIDE | 1977 |
| 1400 BLOCK OKIE ST NE SOUTH SIDE | 1967 |
| 1600 BLOCK K ST NW SOUTH SIDE | 1967 |
Violations by Day of the Week
Most Common Violation on each Day of the Week
| Day | VIOLATION_DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| Friday | FAIL TO DISPLAY A MULTISPACE METER RECEIPT |
| Monday | NO PARKING STREET CLEANING |
| Saturday | FAIL TO DISPLAY A MULTISPACE METER RECEIPT |
| Sunday | NO PARKING ANYTIME |
| Thursday | FAIL TO DISPLAY A MULTISPACE METER RECEIPT |
| Tuesday | FAIL TO DISPLAY A MULTISPACE METER RECEIPT |
| Wednesday | FAIL TO DISPLAY A MULTISPACE METER RECEIPT |
Violations by License Plate State
Top 10, in descending order
| State | Violations | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| MD | 482,757 | 35.7% |
| DC | 388,274 | 28.7% |
| VA | 315,116 | 23.3% |
| PA | 17,515 | 1.3% |
| FL | 14,833 | 1.1% |
| NY | 13,359 | 1.0% |
| NC | 12,649 | 0.9% |
| NJ | 12,163 | 0.9% |
| NA | 10,347 | 0.8% |
| TX | 10,084 | 0.7% |
Crabcakes and parking violations, that’s what Maryland does.