Boston Parking tickets: worst spots and how SpotAngels can save you $$$

Boston is well known for its hefty parking tickets. Between July 2020 and end of June 2021, the City of Boston made over $50m from parking tickets according to the city data.

SpotAngels – the ‘Waze for Parking’ app that helps drivers find street parking and avoid tickets – analyzed this data to show you the best and worst spots and neighborhoods for parking tickets in Boston.

It used the same data to show you the riskiest times to get a ticket for any given spot in the SpotAngels app.

Boston parking ticket numbers

Between July 2020 and end of June 2021, there were 909,097 parking tickets issued in the City of Boston totaling over $50m in revenue. While that is a huge number, it is lower than previous years because the city stopped enforcing some parking rules at the beginning of the pandemic. As an example, in 2018 the city collected over $60m.

A parking ticket cost Boston citizens on average $55.

The most common violation was ‘METER FEE UNPAID’.

For the below study, SpotAngels focused on a subset of 500,922 parking tickets exclusively linked to parking and not driving a vehicle and that have accurate geographic coordinates in Boston neighborhoods covered by the SpotAngels parking map – see the Methodology Section below for the data cleaning process and the list of parking violation codes used.

Boston neighborhoods and parking ticket likelihood

With over 12 parking tickets per 100 spots – North End, West End and Leather District are the neighborhoods where you’re most likely to get a parking ticket.

With less than 6 parking tickets per 100 spots – Mission Hill, Roxbury and Dorchester are where you’re less likely to get a parking ticket.

Neighborhood	# of parking tickets	$ parking tickets	# parking spots with restrictions	Ratio tickets per 100 spots
Back Bay	118,626	$‎ 6,310,230	1,803,165	6.6
Downtown	78,879	$‎ 5,158,620	727,853	10.8
South End	68,755	$‎ 3,533,340	933,762	7.4
South Boston	52,751	$‎ 3,062,240	595,735	8.9
Beacon Hill	41,280	$‎ 2,489,315	391,107	10.6
Fenway	37,857	$‎ 1,868,695	461,933	8.2
North End	27,978	$‎ 1,698,770	230,957	12.1
Mission Hill	17,836	$‎ 1,024,240	300,243	5.9
Chinatown	12,605	$‎ 825,280	117,968	10.7
South Boston Waterfront	12,352	$‎ 666,485	144,373	8.6
West End	7,155	$‎ 549,235	52,924	13.5
Leather District	7,577	$‎ 426,605	57,700	13.1
Roxbury	5,658	$‎ 331,900	96,879	5.8
Dorchester	6,323	$‎ 308,305	117,707	5.4
Bay Village	2,822	$‎ 155,210	24,955	11.3
Longwood	2,468	$‎ 144,150	35,020	7.0

10 worst spots for parking tickets

These are the 10 parking spots with the most parking tickets in the neighborhoods included in the study. Each spot gets more than 1 parking ticket per day, be extra careful when you park there!

# of parking tickets	Address	Neighborhood	Most common parking violations
1345	201 NEWBURY ST, Boston	Back Bay	LOADING ZONE
677	115 NEWBURY ST, Boston	Back Bay	LOADING ZONE
635	46 NEWBURY ST, Boston	Back Bay	LOADING ZONE
629	150 HUNTINGTON AV, Boston	Back Bay	METER FEE UNPAID
606	41 BELVIDERE ST, Boston	Back Bay	METER FEE UNPAID
592	11 AV DE LAFAYETTE, Boston	Downtown	METER FEE UNPAID
590	100 CAMBRIDGE ST, Boston	Downtown	METER FEE UNPAID
581	126 NEWBURY ST, Boston	Back Bay	LOADING ZONE
580	120 IPSWICH ST, Boston	Fenway	RESIDENT PERMIT ONLY METER FEE UNPAID
538	501 BOYLSTON ST, Boston	Back Bay	LOADING ZONE

SpotAngels helps you find free parking and avoid tickets

SpotAngels helps drivers find street parking and avoid tickets in Boston and 100+ cities across North America. The SpotAngels parking map in Boston has parking rules, rates and availability information that is constantly updated by a community of 30k+ active Angels in the city.

The app also shows the riskiest times to get a ticket at a given spot using the Boston city data detailed above.

Most of the features on the app are free. Some are part of the ‘Plus’ plan which provides premium features like the chance to find parking based on historical availability contributions or alternate side parking reminders the night before street cleaning. Plus costs $4.99 a month, $29.99 a year.

How do I get notified if I got a ticket

Go to https://www.spotangels.com/parking_ticket_scanner
Enter your email and license plate and SpotAngels will notify you if you get a new ticket

SpotAngels Methodology

1. SpotAngels submitted a Public Records Request with the City of Boston for the most recent parking tickets data and received a response with the data for the period between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021
2. SpotAngels filtered the data on parking violation codes exclusively in relation to parking and not driving a vehicle. For example, parking violation codes such as ‘BUS STOP/STAND’, ‘EXPIRED/NO PLATE’, ‘EXPIRED INSPECTION’ and similar were excluded. Further below is the list of parking violation codes that SpotAngels focused on.
3. SpotAngels further filtered the data focusing only on parking tickets for which geographic coordinates were found. This was done to avoid considering parking tickets with an incorrect location which would skew the neighborhood breakdown. SpotAngels used Mapbox’s geocoding service for determining the geographic coordinates.
4. SpotAngels associated the geographic coordinates to Boston’s neighborhood limits defined on the City of Boston’s open data hub
5. SpotAngels matched the resulting data to its proprietary parking map data – the SpotAngels map displays all the street parking spots and knows which ones have restrictions. SpotAngels has exhaustive data in several neighborhoods in Boston except for the following where SpotAngels data is partial: Allston, Brighton, Charlestown, East Boston, Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan, Roslindale, West Roxbury
6. SpotAngels computed the average number of tickets per parking spot in each neighborhood