🌎 Geospatial Analysis of DC Parking Violations (2021-2023)

   

Tip

Check out the 1st version of the EDA viz on Tableau Public !

   

⭐ Project Description

This repo contains the datasets and preprocessing/transformation code for a Tableau geospatial analysis of parking violations in Washington, DC from 2021 to 2023.

Although I've never received a parking ticket after many, many years of driving in D.C., I was interested in exploring the data to see if there were any interesting patterns in how/when/where parking violations are enforced throughout the city. Related questions that interest me include:

• How does parking enforcement (i.e. occurrence, severity, or fines) vary by neighborhood– especially in areas of historic over-policing or high rates of gentrification?
• Can we identify any patterns with respect to the parking enforcement agency (e.g. MPD, DPW, etc.), the type of violation (e.g. parking in a bus zone, illegal zone parking, etc.), and ticket dispositions (if/how cases are resolved)?
• How does parking enforcement vary by time of day, day of week, or month of year? Volume of traffic? Proximity to schools and public transportation hubs?

Once I wrangle some pre-2021 data, I'd also like to explore:

• How has parking enforcement varied with changes in urban economic activity due the COVID-19 pandemic?

   

⭐ Data Sources

DC Parking Violations

Data retrieved from Open Data DC under Creative Common License 4.0.

Includes 32 CSVs of parking violations from January 2021 to August 2023. Each CSV contains 1 month of parking violations, and together they sum to approximately 3.1 million lines. Attributes and fields can be found at the links above.

(Data from intermediate months can be found by using the same URL, replacing year and month values.)

DC Parking Beats

Data retrieved from Open Data DC under Creative Common License 4.0.

Includes 1 Shapefile of parking beats, which are the geographic areas that parking enforcement officers patrol. Attributes and fields can be found at the link above.

DC Census Tracts

Data retrieved from US Census Bureau under the public domain.

Includes 1 Shapefile of 2022 DC census tracts.

   

⭐ Instructions for generating violation shapefile

This already exists in the repo as data/violations_shapefile.zip, but if you want to regenerate it, follow these steps:

1. Install Python 3.10.0 or later.
2. Clone this repo to your local machine and navigate into the repo directory.
3. [OPTIONAL] Create a virtual environment for this project:

MacOS/Linux:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Windows:

python -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate

4. Install the required packages:

pip install -r requirements.txt

5. Run the transformation/preprocessing script: MacOS/Linux:

python3 transform.py

Windows:

python transform.py