This story was updated Saturday at 6:00 p.m. Earlier in the day, we got a question from a reader who thought the number of tickets was too low so we went back to Crosstown to check the data. Our reader was right, the numbers were too low. As it turns out the previous datasets provided by Crosstown has used a restrictive search criterion which yielded an inaccurate result, explained Gabriel Kahn, Profession of Professional Practice at USC Annenberg School of Journalism. Our conclusions were still correct and now the numbers are accurate, too. We’ve updated the chart and the numbers in our story to reflect the revised data provided by Crosstown on Saturday.Â
Believe it or not, the actual number of parking tickets issued on Larchmont Blvd. and in the Larchmont neighborhood are down. In fact, they are down all over the city, according to Crosstown, a non-profit news organization based at the University of Southern California that analyzes neighborhood data.
We asked Crosstown to give us Larchmont Blvd.-specific data after we saw its news story on parking violation counts in the city. It turns out, despite seeing parking enforcement vehicles daily on Larchmont (some times even two!), the actual number of violations is down, even below 2015 levels. The trend is continuing too. Just 916 violations were issued during the time period Jan. – Aug. 2019 , down from the same time period last year where there were 1279 tickets issued on Larchmont Blvd. from Jan-Aug in 2018.
The reason the City’s Department of Transportation isn’t giving out as many as tickets is a lack of staff, explained Crosstown data expert Coco Huang, who looked at DOT data going back to 2015. Revenue from parking violations is down all over the city.
Crosstown also gave us some interesting stats for the kind of tickets that are issued, first for the whole city, then narrowed down to our Larchmont neighborhood, which includes Larchmont Blvd. The Larchmont neighborhood used by Crosstown is the area defined by the LA Times Neighborhood Profile as being between by Arden Blvd., Melrose Avenue, Western Avenue and Beverly Blvd.
City-wide, Crosstown provided data on the top five reason for parking violations, with street cleaning violations leading the list by a large percentage. Roughly twice the number of tickets were issued for street cleaning violations, compared to the number of tickets issues for expired meters. Parking in the red zone was the third highest number of tickets, followed by parking in handicapped spots and license plate violations. We are waiting for revised Larchmont-specific data to compare these stats to city-wide data.
Take care when you leave the ‘hood. Crosstown also reported the neighborhoods with the most tickets given out this year. Downtown is the highest, followed by Hollywood, with Mid-Wilshire way down at the bottom of the list. The Larchmont neighborhood had just over 8,000 violations issued in 2018, a fraction of other parts of the city. So, maybe there is no place like home, at least if you don’t want to get a parking ticket!

Now if only they would start ticketing the barbarians who park in the median while running into a coffee shop to get a latte. I’ve been in an around Larchmont for 3 decades and this is a new rotten habit. I’ve seen so many near accidents, and it makes the slow drive up or down Larchmont even worse now.
Something tells me this data is not accurate. I know that is a horrible opinion and reinforces the idea that nothing can be trusted in an age when we need trust in data sources and journalism more than ever…but think about it. The data states that they handed out 89 tickets from January through August of this year. That means 89 tickets over 242 days, and sometimes we all have seen more than one officer working the street! I myself have gotten at least one or two. I can not believe that I am personally responsible for 2% of the violations. I think there is a further story here.
We will double check with Crosstown.
Thanks!