How it works
parking reads the curb rules around where you're going, keeps the ones that are legal for your whole stay, and puts the likeliest-to-be-empty ones in a short loop to drive past. If they're all taken, it hands you a garage.
Why yellow curbs
In LA a yellow curb is a commercial loading zone, usually Monday to Saturday, 7am to 6pm. Outside those hours most of them are ordinary free parking, but most drivers skip them anyway. They're the best-kept secret on a busy street at night, so they go to the front of the loop.
We trust a yellow curb more when the tickets agree. Of the 47,000 yellow-zone tickets LADOT wrote since 2023, 79% landed on a yellow curb we know about, and 95% of those were written during the hours the curb's rules say it's restricted. White curbs check out the same way (96%), and so do meter hours: 98.6% of expired-meter tickets are written while our data says the meter is running. When tickets show up at hours the rules call legal, we tell you to check the sign. About 200 yellow zones are known only from tickets, so their hours are the LA default and flagged as uncertain.
Ticket odds
From a year of LADOT citations (about 1.8 million, geocoded), we count, for every block-sized cell (about 150 m) and every hour of the week, how many of the 52 weeks had at least one ticket written on that block, and how many had one within two blocks. That's how often an officer is working your block, or your neighbourhood, in that hour. Blocks with few tickets borrow from their neighbourhood so one odd week doesn't swing the number. Across a longer stay we combine the hours.
We tested it on weeks it hadn't seen: when it says 9%, it happened 8% of the time; 21%, 18%; 37%, 33%. Holidays are damped the way LADOT's holiday enforcement actually drops.
Culver City, Glendale and Burbank send their tickets with street addresses only, so we placed them using LA County's address points (86–97% found). Their records run to February 2026. Glendale ticketed about half as much from October 2025 on, so we use only that period there. Culver City's odds run a little high in our tests around the holidays.
It's the odds someone comes by, not the odds you get a ticket. Parked legally, a passing officer is nothing to worry about.
Live meters
About 3,900 LADOT meters (mostly downtown, Hollywood, Westwood and Venice) have sensors that report whether the space is taken. We read that feed every minute and show open ones on the map and in the list.
Where the data comes from
- Curb rules: ParkMe's street survey (about 105,000 stretches of curb in central LA, the Westside, South LA and the harbor), snapshot from March 2026.
- Tickets: LADOT parking citations through September 2026, and Culver City, Glendale and Burbank citations through February 2026, placed with LA County address points.
- Live meters: LADOT Parking Meter Occupancy on data.lacity.org.
- Garages: ParkMe, LAZ, SP+, ACE, LADOT city lots and SpotAngels, deduplicated. Prices are estimates from posted rates.
- Map: Protomaps, © OpenStreetMap contributors. Place search: Photon.
The posted sign wins
Rules change, signs get added, and data is never perfect. Read the sign before you walk away. Ticket odds cover the City of LA, Culver City, Glendale and Burbank. Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood curbs are shown, but not their ticketing yet.