LA Parking — Worth the risk?
We all know how difficult it is to find available parking spaces in LA. Sometime we test our luck and park next to fire hydrants, white lines, red lines, etc.…. A few moments later, we see a citation on the car window and the feeling of bitterness envelops us for the rest of the day. Is getting the ticket worth the risk? I think not and with the data collected from the city of LA, let us dive deeper into it.
The data was generously provided by the City of Los Angeles on the kaggle website. Also, check out Anthony Ivan’s article, this has helped me create great visualization. Lastly, a link to my jupyter notebook can be found here.
Bar Graphs Visualization
First, let’s check the top 10 Car Model and top 10 Type of Citations of 2018:
At a glance, first place goes to Toyota, second place to Honda and third place to Ford. Toyota has 50% more citations when compared to the other models except for Honda. One possible explanation for this is that most people do not own luxury brand cars.
Taking a closer look, first place goes to No Park/Street Clean , second place to Meter Expire, and third place to Red Zone. A similar result from the previous bar graph, but the No Park/Street Clean has around 50% more than the other types. In all, 7/10 citations are parking related.
Heat map Visualizations
For these visualizations, I have randomly sample 33,340 rows to best fit the population of parking citations.
Heat map of June 2018
When zoomed, the hot spots is more prevalent around Los Angeles, West Hollywood, and Santa Monica. Now let’s break it down by weeks.
Weekly Heat map of June 2018
West Hollywood, Los Angeles and Santa Monica are hot spots for citations.
· West Hollywood — the area around Hollywood Highland and Hollywood/Vine
· Los Angeles — the Financial District
· Santa Monica — Venice (near the beach), around the intersection of San Diego Freeway and Wilshire Blvd, and the intersection of Corinth Ave and Mississippi Ave
On to the next visualization where we break it down to days.
Daily Heat map of June 2018
The activity is consistent for these three areas, but there is a drop in activity for two days. This suggests it is weekend and it still shows some activity in Los Angeles and West Hollywood area.
Last but no least, the hourly heat map.
Hourly Heat map of June 11, 2018
· 12am to 8am — Concentration is low for West Hollywood and Santa Monica. Semi-high concentration for Los Angeles 4am to 6am.
· 9am to 6pm — The rise of citations in Los Angeles, West Hollywood and Santa Monica.
· 7pm to 12am — The activity decreases throughout the night. Also a slight shift from Los Angeles to West Hollywood.
Conclusion
We can conclude there are citation hot spots in the Los Angeles area. The daily and weekly heat map is consistent for Los Angeles, West Hollywood and Santa Monica . On the hourly heat map, the data shows high citation activity occurring in business hours. Hopefully I convince some of you to think twice before illegally parking in the Los Angeles area.
