Jurisdiction data snapshot
New York City is owed $1.7 billion in unpaid tickets
An analysis of NYC's own published parking-and-camera violation records — 147.7 million citations — shows $1.7B still outstanding. The single largest unpaid category isn't parking at all: it's $320M in school-zone speed-camera tickets. Camera plus parking, in one place, is exactly what a driver-facing reminder layer is built to surface.
Source: NYC Open Data · Open Parking & Camera Violations · 147.7M recordsWhat's actually going unpaid
Outstanding balances by violation type. Camera enforcement — school-zone speed and bus-lane cameras — tops the list, ahead of every parking category. These are exactly the citations a driver never sees until a late notice arrives.
camera enforcement · over $400M of the outstanding balance is camera tickets a plate-based reminder can surface
Most of it is simply never adjudicated
$1.54B of the $1.7B outstanding sits in citations that were never contested or resolved — they just went unpaid. That's not a disputes problem; it's a notification problem.
$9.1B collected, $1.7B not
NYC eventually collects most of what it issues — but at any moment $1.7B is outstanding, aging toward judgment, boot, and tow.
Camera tickets are the gap
37.3M school-zone speed and 4.7M bus-lane camera citations are mailed to the registered owner — easy to miss, and invisible without a plate-based lookup.
How TheTrafficApp helps
We add a consented, resident-facing reminder layer on top of the systems NYC already runs — no change to enforcement, pricing, or the official record.
1 · Residents opt in
Drivers authorize us (clear consent + DPPA basis) to monitor parking and camera citations tied to their plates.
2 · Timely reminders
They're alerted the moment a citation posts — including camera tickets they'd otherwise only learn about by mail — with a one-tap link to NYC's official CityPay.
3 · The city collects sooner
Even a small lift in on-time payment against a $1.7B outstanding balance is a large absolute recovery, with fewer boots, tows, and judgments.
4 · $0 to pilot
A narrow pilot reading public citation status. We never take the payment or touch the official record.
The pitch in one line
NYC has $1.7B outstanding — $400M+ of it camera tickets drivers can't see without a plate lookup. A consented reminder layer surfaces both parking and camera citations before they escalate, at no cost and no system change for the city.
Sources & method
Figures are computed directly from NYC Open Data's Open Parking and Camera Violations
dataset (resource nc67-uf89), which tracks 147,714,200 citations across
the payment lifecycle. Totals: $9.60B fines issued, $9.14B paid, $1.71B outstanding
(amount_due). Outstanding-by-type uses sum(amount_due) grouped by
violation; status uses violation_status. This is a point-in-time snapshot of
public records to illustrate the collection gap — not a claim about any individual driver.
Data: data.cityofnewyork.us.
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