New study reveals where you're most likely to get a parking ticket
HOUSTON (KTRK) -- New research shows the areas of Houston where you're most likely to get busted for parking violations and whether the type of car you're driving could make a difference.
According to this study, if you're parking in Rice Village, Downtown or Montrose, you're more likely to get a ticket than any other part of the city.
The researchers behind this study call the high-risk areas "parking ticket hot spots."
"So if you're looking at parking meters, often you'll see that in the downtown area almost exclusively," says Rice University senior Jordan Poles.
Expired meter citations and parking in a tow-away zone are by far the top two tickets handed out, with more than 100,000 each over the nearly four-year period Poles analyzed.
"Chevrolet, Toyota, Ford, and Honda...these common cars received a lot of tickets," he says.
Perhaps that's because those are the most common makes on the road in Houston. When they broke the data down to number of tickets in proportion to the number of the car on the road by brand, the top of that list changed.
"So Jaguar and Infiniti, particularly, had more tickets per cars on the road," Poles says. "That sort of suggests individuals that drive those cars may be doing more illegal parking activity."
"We don't know if somebody drives a Jaguar and gets 50 tickets a day and just parks on the sidewalk," says Sketch City founder Jeff Reichman. "For all we know, there could be one jerk in a Jaguar driving around parking on the sidewalk."
Reichman's non-profit worked with Poles on this project. He says they got the data from the city that anybody can access. He also says the hot spots confirmed some suspicions.
"Honestly I'm not surprised because if I were running a parking ticketing authority, I would want to optimize the routes."
Also surprising, Jordan Poles says, is who's writing those tickets.
"There were 2,750 or so ticketing officers in the database. However, of those officers, only about 50 of them gave the majority of tickets. So we figured out there were probably some guys who are very busy on the streets giving tickets."
The city says this was from the recent city of Houston Hackathon. It put the data out there for the public to analyze and use however they can, but it can't verify how Jordan put together his findings. The guys behind this study say take what you want from this, but be careful -- the streets are watching.
"Feed the meter, because they're paying attention and they're writing tickets," says Jeff Reichman.
