by @BarryRafkind in City Finances, Public Records / FOIA Requests, Somerville By The Numbers, Traffic & Parking
Posted on May 19, 2011 at 12:26 am
Last Modified on July 28, 2011 at 8:51 pm
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When Watertown, MA resident Mark Pickering received a parking citation during a visit to a friend in nearby Somerville, he figured a simple letter to the Office of the Parking Clerk would result in a scheduled hearing or a ticket dismissal. Instead, he received an anonymous note of rejection with an extra $5 fine. [See Mark's letter in the SJ : Parking ticket appeal system needs work]
Such anecdotes are not uncommon in Somerville where parking enforcement has been compared to extortion. To find out if there are trends in which types of ticket appeals get dismissed or upheld, I filed a public records request with the City through MuckRock.com and raised money to cover the costs on Spot.Us. I’ve posted my Excel spreadsheet of data and charts here.
To begin, let’s take a look at how many ticket appeals were submitted each month between July 1, 2009 to Feb 15, 2011. Then let’s break it down to look for trends :
In the next chart, we see that actually the success rate has fluctuated from a low of about 15% to a high around 45%.
There appears to be a seasonal trend with the dismissal rate dropping toward Winter and rising during Summer. Let’s see if that correlates with the type of appeals being made (limit to the top 5 violation types by count) :
Indeed, it appears that during the winter months, the proportion of permit parking appeals dropped while snow ticket appeals rose. Let’s see if these violation types actually have different rates of dismissal (success). Note, the following chart contains only the top 12 violation types.
It seems like maybe the violation types that are more likely to be dismissed have less to do with public safety. This might help explain why snow related ticket appeals, for example, might be upheld more often than permit parking ticket appeals.
Now, let’s take a look at whether the hearing officers review similar distributions of violations. (The numbers inside are counts of appeals of each of the top 5 violation types by count)
So the distributions of the violation types are roughly similar across the hearing officers. Then does it matter which hearing officer reviews your appeal? Apparently, it does:
Perhaps this can be explained by the distribution of the method of appeal seen by each officer. The data indicated whether the appeal was made online (Yes) or via mail/in-person (No).
Interestingly, it appears that lower proportions of online (Yes) appeals correlate with higher dismissal rates among the officers. But correlation does not imply causation, so we don’t know whether the officers who dismiss appeals more often do so because they get fewer online appeals, or perhaps that’s just a coincidence. It’s also unclear why certain officers end up reviewing higher or lower proportions of online appeals.
Actually, you’d be almost 11% less likely to succeed (get a dismissal) if you file online.
It’s not clear why this discrepancy exists, perhaps apologies/explanations in-person are more persuasive to the hearing officers, or maybe it’s just harder to look someone in the eye and tell them they still have to pay.
Since online appeals are less likely to succeed, then hopefully people have figured this out and will be filing online less often. Whoops, looks like filing online is becoming more popular:
Next, I graphed each officer’s dismissal rate over time :
DSHEPPARD seems to follow the seasonal pattern as does JVIVOLO to a lesser degree. Meanwhile, LMURPHY and SJONES both served only for a short while, but had extremely low or high dismissal rates that tracked the seasons. Oddly, DSUSI seems to be fairly consistent across the seasons.
The data doesn’t show what reason each appeal was made, but it does give the reasons why certain tickets were dismissed. Here’s the breakdown:
These reasons aren’t very clear, but it appears that the vast majority of dismissed tickets were done as a “courtesy”. Apologizing also seems to be a successful strategy sometimes.
In conclusion, your odds of successfully appealing a ticket correlate with the type of violation, the season, the hearing officer, and whether you file your appeal online or not.
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See Andy Metzger’s response today Setting story straight on Somerville parking appeals on WickedLocal
Thanks to Traffic & Parking Director Matt Dias for his prompt and professional handling of my records request.
Thanks to Michael Morisy at MuckRock.com for helping to convert the PDF documents into spreadsheet format.
Thanks to David Cohn at Spot.Us for promoting this story and to all the micro-funders who chipped in.
Thanks to other Somerville Voices editors who provided some helpful feedback to me during my analysis.
Link to my original post about this story in January and an update in April.
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These data show that since the extortionist parking regime has been implemented, the trend in the appeals rate is consistently downward. Perhaps this is because despair is setting in regarding the rationality and justice of the system.
Last month, a guest of mine stayed for three days instead of two, but received two tickets for being parked–with a visitor permit–for more than 48 hours. He appealed. Despite the fact that the times on the citations clearly showed that they had both been issued within the additional 24 hour period, he received a denial and an additional fine.
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Bill, was any reason given for the extra fine your guest received? Do you know what method s/he used to appeal? Was your guest from out-of-town? I wonder whether residents are more or less likely to succeed with dismissals, although the data does not indicate the appellant’s city of residence, unfortunately.
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The appeal was by email. The response was simply “Denied,” without an explanation. Because the appeal process made the payment late, there was a $15 penalty.
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While I appreciate the volume of data here, I don’t think I agree with all the arguments:
1.) It doesn’t surprise or worry me that dismissal rates fluctuate over time. Events that cause tickets are cyclical (street sweeping, snow emergencies, etc.), and given that “apologizing” is a good way to get a ticket dismissed, an apology might be better accepted if the parker had reason to “forget” a rule (as you would in April for a street sweeping ticket as opposed to August).
2.) I’m also not surprised that online appeals don’t get dismissed as often. This may be because there is much less effort and energy required to submit an online appeal, so there may be a lot more “weak” appeals submitted online. It should also be obvious that more people are submitting appeals online, because more people are doing EVERYTHING online.
3.) What is concerning to be is the difference made by what officer you get to appeal your ticket, particularly when you see the numbers of the two officers no longer doing this – one who dismissed ~95% of tickets and one who dismissed ~5%. I’m assuming here that the officers processed a similar amount of and type of appeals here, too (would love to see all the data, is it available?).
While the numbers do not indicate to me an extortion scheme, they do seem to suggest that there are few guidelines given to the officers that determine their decisions in the appeals process, and numbers like these have not been reviewed by the T&P department.
Great article.
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Chuck, thanks for your response.
I have posted my data in an Excel spreadsheet here on Google Docs.
You make a good point about the seasonal nature of the tickets, so I’ve updated the article with a graphic showing how the major violation types vary by month. I’ve also revised some of my conclusions and added a couple more charts.
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My daughter was parked in front of my house, She had the parking placard on the dash in clear view but was still given a $100 ticket. She went to appeal it and lost. How is this possible, I am an 85 year old women who has lived in Somerville her whole life, I walked out and gave her the pass and watched her put it on dash. By her losing her appeal we were both virtually called liars..when the real liar was the person who said, it could not have been there case closed…
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dot, the officer should have presented photographic evidence. I thought I’d heard they started taking pictures, so I wonder how long ago that ticket was issued.
By the way, I am impressed that you are so adept at using the computer at your age!
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The interesting part of this is SJones. Is he the former acting director/somerville police officer/acting director/traffic and parking hearing officer?
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If Somerville residents want change, we need to demand it from our elected officials. Those who who refuse to act or are apologists for the parking department should be swept out of office. If I were a candidate for mayor, I’d pledge to reduce non-safety related fines by 50%, allow neighborhood residents (not the city) to determine where permit parking applies, and draw the street sweeping schedule so it inconveniences residents as little as possible (as opposed to sweeping residential main roads overnight and starting side street sweeping in the early AM hours).
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Dave, why don’t you run for mayor, or at least alderman?
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My mother passed away and my sister lives in Somerville. There are 6 of us and we were all coming in from all over the world. On street cleaning day I forgot to move my car in time, our minds weren’t on the car as we had to plan a funeral. I got a ticket and appealed online as I live in Pa. I stayed another week as my sister fro Norway was staying that long and she was really broken up. The following Thur we went to pick up my mother’s ashes we’d had trouble at the funeral home and we didn’t think we were going to be able to bring th ashes home as since my sister was going back to Norway the next day and I was going to Pa we were very upset. I forgot to put the visitors pass on the dash it was under the visor. I got another ticket and again I appealed on line as I had to go home. This ticket was forgiven. Being from out of town and under these circumstances I couldn’t believe they both weren’t forgiven.
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Not sure if you saw this, but this helps to explain why the data looks the way it does:
http://blogs.wickedlocal.com/somerville/2011/05/20/setting-story-straight-on-somerville-parking-appeals/
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Charlie, the blog only tells us what the city staff told the reporter.
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See my new article Follow-up to Parking Ticket Trends Story
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