I-Team: Boston Parking Ticket Secrets
BOSTON (CBS) - It is part of living or visiting Boston; at some point, most of us will get a parking ticket. But the I-Team discovered a few secrets about how those violations are written that just may help you avoid that dreaded orange envelope.
The I-Team analyzed reams of data from the city of Boston. We looked at 1.3 million tickets written in the city in 2013. We found that drivers are most likely to get a ticket on a Tuesday, in October on Commonwealth Avenue.
Our analysis showed the other streets where the most tickets are written include: Boylston St., Beacon St., Tremont St., Washington St and Newbury St. Nearly 200,000 tickets were written on those streets alone.
If you are going to take a chance, the odds may be in your favor on Mondays. Meter attendants wrote an average of about 3,000 tickets on Mondays last year, far less than the nearly 5,000 on the average Tuesday.
The data shows that a lot of snow means fewer tickets. In February of last year, only 88,000 cars got tickets in Boston. Compare that to October, the busiest month, with the city fining more than 123,000 cars.
Expired meters and parking in a resident spot are the most common reasons for tickets. Other frequently written tickets are all about reading the sign carefully. We ran into a meter attendant writing a ticket to a car that at first glance, looked legally parked. "This poor person didn't realize this was a loading zone," he said.
You may want to brush up on your parallel parking skills. The city wrote 2,245 violations to people who were more than one foot from the curb.
Some tickets didn't have to anything at all to do with parking. 87,000 drivers got tagged for expired inspections.
We also ran into several people, including David Ross of Acton, who are convinced they didn't deserve a ticket at all. "It says over the time limit," he said pulling the car out from under his windshield wiper. "Nope, that's not true. I guess I'll be going to city hall," he said.
If you get a ticket, that may be worth a try. The city threw out 71,000 tickets last year, worth over three million dollars.
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