LA Street Rules

LADOT parking citations (data.lacity.org, dataset 4f5p-udkv) from the last two years, rebuilt every week.

Each ticket's address is matched to the City of Los Angeles street centerlines (LA GeoHub), which list the house numbers on each side of every stretch of street. A block is one street's hundred block, and its line on the map is the part of the street those numbers cover. Tickets written at an intersection, like "5th St / Wall St", have no house number and are left out, and so are streets outside the City of Los Angeles. The centerlines also say which side of the street has the even numbers, so the card names the compass side.

The posted day, weeks and time come from StreetsLA's map of posted sweeping routes. Each route covers an area and is swept on two days, one for each side of the street. A side gets the route day that matches the weekday of most of its sweeping tickets, among the routes those tickets sit inside. A side needs at least 8 sweeping tickets for that. The card also counts how many of a side's sweeping tickets on its sweep day fell in its posted weeks, since signs often show only the day. A few routes, like Downtown's, are swept every week; one with no fixed time is left out. Tickets written outside the posted time aren't counted. When neither side is matched, the card lists the posted route days around the block instead (tested a few metres to each side of the street), without saying which side gets which, or says that no posted route covers it. "Tickets were written on X% of sweep days" counts posted days with at least one ticket, leaving out holidays and any day with no sweeping tickets anywhere in the city.

Monday to Saturday, 8 am to 8 pm, holidays left out. A visit is a group of meter tickets on one block with no gap over 10 minutes. An officer who finds every meter paid leaves no ticket, so the visit rate is adjusted for those empty visits, assuming the number of expired cars an officer finds on a visit is random (Poisson). A block needs at least 20 meter tickets. Which blocks have meters comes from LADOT's meter inventory (dataset s49e-q6j2).

LADOT's handheld devices write the same rule in different ways, like "STANDNG IN ALLEY" or "8069B NO PARK ST CLN", so tickets are grouped by violation code under one plain name. The no-stopping codes, including the rush-hour ones, all become "No stopping", and the usual hours show when they're written. Fines are the median of the tickets that list one. Tapping a kind shows what the rule is and the ticket code LADOT writes most often for it. For the block's most ticketed kind, and any kind with at least 50 tickets there, it also opens a dot chart of the half hour each ticket was written.

A ticket only appears when someone broke the rule, so quiet blocks look less enforced than they are, and a rule nobody was ticketed for doesn't show up at all. Addresses that couldn't be matched are left out. Routes and staffing change, and none of this is a promise about next week. Always read the posted signs, and for sweeping, the city's schedule.

• LADOT Parking Citations and Metered Parking Inventory, data.lacity.org
• Streets (Centerline), City of Los Angeles GeoHub
• Posted Street Sweeping Routes, StreetsLA (as of July 2026): each route's area, days, weeks and posted time
• Map © OpenStreetMap contributors, loaded from openstreetmap.org
• LA Times Neighborhood Boundaries, Los Angeles Times via LA GeoHub (CC BY 4.0): the neighborhood outlines on the map
• LADOT's weekly update of March 4, 2021 on enforcing street sweeping only on the days streets are swept, and Larchmont Chronicle on LADOT's policy for sweeping signs that still show every week; the city's own lookup is at streets.lacity.gov