CurbScout Data

Los Angeles wrote 1.9 million parking tickets last year. Here's exactly where.

We analyzed every parking citation the city recorded over twelve months — 1,928,025 of them, $173 million in fines — to find the blocks, violations, and neighborhoods where drivers actually get caught.

By Kanha Narla · Published October 12, 2026 · Source: the city's open-data citation records · 12 months ending June 30, 2026

What is the most common parking ticket in Los Angeles?

Street cleaning, and it isn't close. The city wrote 495,705 street-cleaning citations in twelve months, about one in every four tickets, and roughly $36 million in fines at $73 a ticket. Red curbs come second with 237,799, and expired meters, the ticket most drivers plan around, are third with 226,011. That is about 5,282 tickets on an average day, or one every 16 seconds, day and night.

Why is street cleaning the biggest ticket?

Because it is the one rule that moves. A meter is where it was yesterday; a sweeping window arrives on a schedule, one side of one block at a time, and the sign that announces it can sit half a block from the space you chose. A car parked legally on Sunday night can be in the way of the sweeper by Tuesday morning.

It is also the common ticket you can see coming days ahead. The posted schedule for each block is public, which is exactly what CurbScout reads: it shows the sweeping window for the block you pick and ranks the blocks whose sweeping window does not fall inside the hours you plan to stay (see how the street-cleaning alerts work). At about $73 a ticket, one missed sweep costs more than a full year of the app.

What are the $293 bus-lane tickets?

The fifth bar is not written at the curb. Cameras mounted on buses wrote 146,184 tickets at $293 each — 122,310 for stopping in a bus-only lane and 23,874 for stopping at a bus stop — which is 8% of the tickets but $43 million, or 25% of every fine dollar in the year. One of them costs as much as about 4 street-cleaning tickets. These camera tickets are in the citywide totals above, but we left them out of the block and neighborhood rankings below: they are filed at the camera's bus-route intersection rather than at a curb address, and they would otherwise crowd out the blocks where people actually park.

Which address gets the most parking tickets in Los Angeles?

Not downtown. The most-ticketed address in the city is 3000 Canyon Lake Drive in the Hollywood Hills, the narrow road up to Lake Hollywood Park and its view of the Hollywood Sign: 2,863 tickets in a year, about 8 a day. Almost all of them are for the curb, not the meter: 2,067 for stopping in a red zone, 477 for leaving the wheels more than 18 inches from the curb, and 109 for a fire hydrant. Counting the next block up the hill, the road drew 6,057 tickets.

Where do the tickets land?

What are the most-ticketed blocks in LA?

Two of the twelve, Corinth Ave and Mississippi Ave, are in Sawtelle, and on both the leading ticket is the permit-only district: a residential block where anyone without that district's permit gets a short posted limit, or none. The rest split between the Hollywood Hills road to the Sign, downtown's red and white curbs, a Highland Park lot, and the metered blocks of Brentwood, Venice and the Valley.

Which LA neighborhoods get the most parking tickets?

Downtown leads the city by more than two to one: 173,576 tickets, about 10% of all the city's non-camera tickets with a map position, against 75,931 in second-place Westlake. Koreatown and Hollywood follow, and the Westside's Sawtelle, home to two of the twelve most-ticketed blocks, rounds out the top five.

• Downtown173,576
• Westlake75,931
• Koreatown70,998
• Hollywood66,264
• Sawtelle63,206
• Boyle Heights58,903
• Venice43,430
• Van Nuys42,615

What does a parking ticket cost in Los Angeles?

The figures below are the amount printed on nearly every ticket of its kind in the city's own records, not an average: a few thousand records carry a $0 fine and would drag an average down. A street-cleaning ticket was $73 (495,697 of 495,705 carried exactly that amount). A posted no-parking ticket was also $73. An expired meter was $63, overtime in a permit-only district $68, double parking and a fire hydrant $68, and a red zone or a posted no-stopping zone $93. Parking with your wheels more than 18 inches from the curb was $63 (20,955 tickets on two-way streets).

The cheapest common ticket is for not displaying your plates, $25, and it is still the fourth most common in the city, with 125,571 written. At the other end: $163 for an anti-gridlock zone (15,093 tickets), $293 for a bus lane or bus stop, and $363 for using a disabled space without a placard displayed (7,175 tickets). Against those, CurbScout costs nothing for the first 14 days, with no card, then $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year, less than a single street-cleaning ticket.

How do you avoid the most common tickets?

Know the sweeping day before you leave the car. It is 26% of all tickets and entirely avoidable. Check the day, the hours and the side of the street on the nearest sign, not just the block.

Treat every red curb as no stopping at all. 237,799 red-zone tickets were written in a year, at $93 each, and the city's single most-ticketed address is a red curb. Red means no stopping, standing or parking, even with someone in the car.

Read the meter's hours, not just its time. 226,011 expired-meter tickets were written in a year. Meter hours and time limits differ from block to block; CurbScout shows the hours and the rate for the block you pick.

Check for a permit-only district. 121,902 tickets went to cars without the district's permit. Read every sign along the block, not just the one nearest the car. If you hold a permit, tell CurbScout your district and those blocks turn parkable for you.

Stay out of bus lanes and bus stops, even for a minute. The cameras ride the bus, so the ticket arrives by mail: $293, the price of about 4 street-cleaning tickets. Bus-only lanes are signed and marked on the pavement; check the posted hours before you stop.

Read next

• San Francisco's most-ticketed blocks: 1.3 million tickets, mapped
• The 32 cities CurbScout covers, block by block
• What CurbScout costs and how the 14-day trial works
• Set up your residential parking permit in CurbScout
• Why the posted sign always wins over any dataset
• Press kit: facts, assets and a person to email

Where does this data come from, and how fresh is it?

Counts are computed from the City of Los Angeles's public parking-citation records on the open-data portal, citations issued July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026 — 1,928,025 records. Dollar figures are the face value of fines as issued, not amounts collected; 27,006 records carry a $0 fine and are counted as tickets but add nothing to the dollar total. Fine amounts quoted on this page are the amounts recorded on the tickets themselves. The records cover the city of Los Angeles only; Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Culver City and the other cities inside the county write their own tickets and are not included.

Bus-camera tickets (146,184 records with no officer route and a "direction, street @ cross street" location) are included in the totals and the violation chart and excluded from the block, address, map and neighborhood rankings. Blocks are hundred-blocks rolled up from citation addresses, with spelling variants of the same street merged; 2,864 citations carry no usable map position and 31,386 more are recorded at an intersection rather than an address, and both are left out of the block rankings. Neighborhoods are assigned by placing each address's average position inside the city's 114 neighborhood boundaries (the Mapping L.A. boundaries published on the city's GeoHub); 9,529 tickets fall outside every boundary. Violation descriptions are the dataset's own abbreviations, translated conservatively. Data retrieved October 12, 2026. The posted sign always wins over any dataset, ours included; see how accurate CurbScout is.