Infographic: Move your car

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Over the past year, Buffalo issued more parking summonses, by far, for not following alternate side of the street parking rules than for anything else.

Using city parking summons data available through Open Buffalo, Investigative Post found 43 percent of over 142,000 summons issued in a one-year period – ending in late October – went to vehicles parked on the wrong side of the street.  The next most frequently issued tickets went to vehicles in No Parking zones. They represented 12 percent of tickets.

As a comparison,  we looked at ticketing data the city released for an almost 18-year period from 2007 to 2024. That data showed similar trends, with 39 percent of all summonses for alternate side of the street violations, and 9 percent for No Parking violations.

One difference between the one-year and 18-year data involves meter overtime violations, which were about 5 percent of tickets issued over the past year compared with almost 12 percent over the 18-year period. The reduction likely reflects the Buffalo Roam parking app the city began using in 2017, which allows motorists to extend metered parking from their phones.

We also looked at the most-ticketed streets, which are primarily in the downtown/Central business district or adjacent streets in the Allentown area or the upper West Side. As many know from their own experience, Elmwood is the most ticketed street in the city, with plenty of summonses issued in all the top categories, including alternate side of the street parking, overdue meters, parking on bus routes, and parking in front of driveways or in No Parking or No Standing zones.

When we looked at a month-by-month breakdown of tickets issued over the past three years, we found a lot of  fluctuation.  The largest number of tickets issued in one month was almost 19,000 in March 2022.  The least  was about 7,300 in August 2023.

There were more tickets issued in the last 12 months (about 140,000) than in the previous 12 (about 120,000) , but fewer than in the first 12 months of the 36-month period (about 160,000).
Over the past 15 years, there typically have been 12,000 to 18,000 parking tickets issued in Buffalo each month, according to the city parking department, although the data shows some two dozen months over the past five years when fewer than 10,000 tickets were issued.

Investigative Post staff