Cost Analysis of Parking in LA

Neema Saberi, Jake Steinberg, Ilana Zeldin, Guy Katz

DS3001 Final Project

Problem

Have you ever been driving around LA without quarters in your car, but needed a place to park? Neither have we. However, this is a webpage that will show you where in LA you should park with the lowest probability of getting ticketed for every hour of the day.

We analyze the ‘cost’ of parking illegally over any given time interval in any location in LA.

Dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/cityofLA/los-angeles-parking-citations

Data Cleaning

We chose to include data from 2016, 2017, and 2018 in order to make sure we had data for 3 complete years and to ensure the data was not too skewed seasonally. However, we had to apply the Google API to each data point to convert the address to a longitude & latitude coordinate. With close to 3 million data points at .367 seconds per data point, this would have taken around 300 hours to run. Therefore, we chose 10,000 random occurrences from the three years to create a manageable data sample. Furthermore, we also deleted rows from the original dataset that had missing values for the issue time, location, and violation description. These columns represent the data we used to create our heat map, and we did not want to guess their missing values, especially since we already had an abundance of data. Thus, if any of these columns had missing values, they were deleted.

Insight and Takeaways

The average number of tickets from 2016 to 2018 were graphed by month. March has the highest average tickets per month with almost 100 thousand tickets. October had the lowest average with close to 70 thousand tickets. There is no correlation between season and average tickets per month, most likely due to the fact the Los Angeles weather stays relatively constant.

The top 20 most ticketed addresses were counted for 2016 to 2018. Electric avenue was the most ticketed street by over 3000 tickets. This is a commercial area near Venice Beach with many restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. Because of the high traffic in this area the street most likely gets packed with cars and many people illegally park.

The average number of tickets per hour from 2016-2018 is very important. This graph shows the top times where people are getting parking tickets. 8 AM has the most tickets per day, this is most likely because people arrive to work around 8 AM, so parking spots are at a premium so many people illegally park. This is similar for noon, because many people leave and come back for lunch so it is a very similar process. 10 AM also has many tickets per day, this is most likely because many of the technology companies with a younger population of employees have now started to come into work at 10 AM. The times from 1-7 AM and 8-12 PM had virtually no tickets per day. This is because in many parts of the city there are no longer parking meters needed and there are fewer people at work and in the city.

Cost Function

A function was created to identify the present cost of parking at a specific street in LA, based on two times (The Code in Listed in the Master Branch). If the street name is not recognizable or not in the database, the function suggests searching a nearby street.

Code: https://github.com/nmsaberi/DS3001Project/blob/master/Cost%20Function.ipynb

Interactive Map

An interactive map was created using Tableau. The map allows users to view the general parking violation area map of LA for every day of the week, 24 hours a day sorted by fine amount.

The map allows users to scroll over individual incidents to see specific ticket information.

Users can also filter the tickets on the interactive map by specific time and day, allowing users to identify specific locations to avoid at a certain time and day.

Tableau File: https://github.com/nmsaberi/DS3001Project/blob/master/LA_Traffic(New).twb