These Are The Worst Places To Park In NYC

NEW YORK, NY — Drivers in New York City should stay out of Manhattan at all costs, according to a new analysis from the parking app SpotAngels. The borough generated more than $200 million in parking fines last year, nearly half the $440 million collected across the five boroughs, the study found.

Drivers in just 10 Manhattan neighborhoods paid more than $151 million in fines last year, the study shows. The Upper East Side had some of the riskiest parking spots — its more than 18,000 spaces got about 448,000 tickets worth nearly $33.2 million.

SpotAngels analyzed public data from the city's Department of Finance, which administers parking ticket fines, along with its own maps of New York City's streets to figure out which parts of the city were the worst for parking.

Manhattan's average parking ticket cost $79.82, outpacing the other four boroughs. But some neighborhoods are worse than others — the average fine was about $101 in Battery Park City but just $64 in Greenwich Village.

Brooklyn was the second-pricest borough for drivers last year, the study found. Cops issued more than 1.9 million tickets there last year, generating $120.6 million in fines.

Manhattan alone produced more parking fines than all of San Francisco, New York's rival when it comes to parking costs, the SpotAngels study shows. The borough's average space gets 14 parking tickets, more than the 11 issued in San Francisco's riskiest neighborhood.

Manhattan has far more "no-standing" rules than other boroughs, preventing drivers from parking on major streets to keep traffic moving. That leads to a higher number of more expensive tickets, especially for commercial vehicles trying to make quick stops, said Aboud Jardaneh, SpotAngels' co-founder.

"Even when they stop for a couple of minutes, they think they're going to drop off something in a store, they get fined right away," Jardaneh said.

A no-standing ticket was most common in Manhattan, while street cleaning and meter rules dominated the outer boroughs.

Some of the most-ticketed neighborhoods often have a mix of residential buildings and commercial thoroughfares — such as the Upper East Side — as customers and residents have to compete for a small number of spaces, Jardaneh said.

Staten Island is the best borough for cars. The borough's drivers collected just 240,000 tickets last year with an average fine of $70.77, on par with the citywide average of $70.

The city's drivers pay a price for clean streets, the data show. Violations of street-cleaning rules was the most common cause of a ticket, accounting for 43 percent of all fines last year. Those tickets cost $45 to $65.

Check out the map below to see the borough-by-borough breakdown of New York City's parking ticket costs.

(Lead image from NY.gov)