San Francisco might be due $200 million in late parking fines; NYC drivers owe $1 billion

Unpaid parking tickets and unpaid tolls are making news lately, maybe because the amounts at issue are wildly large. On the West Coast, The San Francisco Standard logged data on 6.4 million parking tickets issued by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) from Monday, January 1, 2018, to Sunday, September 24, 2023. Yeah, that's a lot of windshield wipers playing paperweight: An average of nearly 3,058 tickets every day for 2,093 days. The Standard says that the total fine amount for all the tickets came to about $601 million, averaging almost $94 per ticket. Factoring in overdue payment penalties from about 1 million tickets, or 16%, adds $137 million. That turns errant parking jobs and civil disobedience into a theoretical $737 million bill. The data shows that at least $200 million of that bill is outstanding, which The Standard believes is higher because the data only goes back to 2018. The paper suggests this is a pressing matter because Mayor London Breed believes the city by the bay could be facing a $500 million shortfall for its next fiscal year.