How to avoid a parking ticket

I am taking a trip to Montgomery, Maryland and would like to tour the city. I would like to avoid any extra expenses if possible, and would like to know how to avoid any unnecessary parking tickets.

Key questions I would like to answer:

  • What is the most common parking violation?
  • Where do the most parking tickets occur?
  • What time of day is most ticketed?
  • Is there a day of the week, or time of year that is lower risk of getting a parking ticket?

Data obtained from Data.gov by DOT in Montgomery, Maryland for 2020-2021 Data is imported to SQL server data base

Key Columns are Date/Time, Ticket Location, and Violation Code/Description

Strategy to clean the errors:

  1. Check and Delete Duplicates
  2. Ignore data with null date, location, or violation 
  3. Fix date error and Convert Date/Time from a string to DATETIME data type 
  4. Distill the current violation descriptions (of around 20 types) to more condensed seven categories

(For ex. OFF street and On street tickets for the same violation is redundant) 

Check for duplicates
Fix Year error in Date/Time String
Convert Date/Time String to DATETIME type
Violation codes are grouped into a category by similarity. For a total of 7 violation types

Metrics

We wish to find violation frequency, location frequency, and time of day frequency

Violation frequency table and Location frequency table creation are nearly identical
Tickets per day
Classifying time of day. Morning(6am-12pm),Afternoon(12pm-6pm), and
Evening(6pm-12am)

Dashboard & Results

We can immediately see that the most common violation is overstaying at a parking space.

And that we are perhaps slightly more likely to get a ticket if we hang around until the afternoon.

We also see it would be nice to plan a trip in the late summer July, August, September. And park in the city on a Monday.

The most ticketed location is Bethesda street.