LA Issued Nearly $1 Million in Bogus Street Sweeping Tickets

HERE IS A FACT that many Angelenos don’t know: Despite what the thousands of signs mounted around the city claim, most streets in the City of L.A. are only swept every other week. On weeks when there’s no street sweeping, the city promises you won’t get a ticket.

But an L.A. Material analysis of parking ticket data shows the city hasn’t kept that vow.

Since March 2021, when the city began cleaning streets every other week due to budget cuts, the Department of Transportation has issued more than 12,500 street sweeping tickets on days when there wasn’t actually any sweeping, according to L.A. Material’s analysis. 

That’s a small percentage of the more than 2.4 million street sweeping citations it issued during that time — but one that still equates to $910,000 in fines. 

Roughly a sixth of these erroneous tickets have been levied along a single corridor in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In South Park, the $73 street sweeping tickets have hit residents so hard that some say they’ve had to forgo grocery shopping after finding one of the dreaded envelopes on their windshield. 

"I can't buy food if I have to pay a ticket," said Rufina Estrada, 64, who lives in the neighborhood and makes money by redeeming cans and bottles at recycling centers.

When presented with L.A. Material’s findings, the Department of Transportation, also known as LADOT, asserted that it “proactively dismisses any street sweeping citations issued in error” and “sends instructions for reimbursement to motorists who have already provided payment.”

But it repeatedly declined to provide specific data that would show how many of the tickets identified by L.A. Material were actually canceled or reimbursed.

One expert said he suspected that at least some residents were never made whole.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they missed some, because a lot of tickets get written, and there’s no such thing as a total failsafe,” said Michael Manville, a UCLA professor of urban planning who has studied L.A.’s parking enforcement. “It’s just bound to happen in a city of this size.”

L.A. Material identified the mistakenly issued tickets by using a computer script to compare time and location data from the city’s traffic citation database against street sweeping routes and schedules.

The bad tickets have been issued in all parts of the city. But no neighborhood has been hit harder than South Park.

In this dense corridor of side streets along a 1.5-mile stretch of Avalon Boulevard, the city has issued more than 1,900 erroneous parking tickets over the last six years. That amounts to a $141,500 bogus penalty in a neighborhood where the per capita income, according to the census, is just $16,769.

Here, where sun-faded cars crowd the curbs of homes guarded by wrought iron fences, the city’s claim that it voids bad tickets — which it says it does every other week — provides little comfort. 

Over days of canvassing the neighborhood, almost every one of the two-dozen residents interviewed by L.A. Material said they had received a street sweeping ticket. Half were aware that sweepers only visit every other week, but nobody had ever heard of anyone getting refunds.

Juan Carlos Lopez, a 39-year-old maintenance mechanic who shares a home with his parents, described parking citations as a stressful and inevitable feature of life on his block. 

“They find a way to get you, even when we’re on top of it and everything,” Lopez said. “It takes from your groceries, gas — everything is expensive as hell here.”

Standing outside the gated front yard of his tan stucco home on East 47th Street, Raul Avalos, 60, said many of his neighbors speak limited English, which makes them reluctant to contest citations. 

“They get a ticket and they just pay it,” he said. (LADOT has a program that allows low-income residents to pay tickets on an installment plan, but many residents said they hadn’t heard of it.)

By the numbers, more than 1 in 10 people in this neighborhood have received a bum ticket, but few of those contacted by L.A. Material still had records of the tickets they received, making it impossible to retroactively check whether they were owed refunds.

Maria Alcala, 45, said she once argued with an officer who issued her a street-sweeping ticket on a non-sweeping day. She said she showed the officer the sweeping schedule on her phone, but he brushed her off because the posted sign banned parking every week.

Alcala said she contested the ticket but never received a verdict, or even a response. She never paid it, meaning it could be on her record with late fees and fines — and would need to be paid when she next renews her registration.

Studies have shown that low-income neighborhoods in L.A. are hit disproportionately with all kinds of parking citations, from street sweeping to red curb violations. It’s easy to see why.

The four census tracts in this neighborhood are home to roughly 17,000 people, making it three times as densely populated as the city at large. The average household has 4.4 people — nearly twice the city average — and many own multiple vehicles.

Karen Santamaria, 33, described the neighborhood as a wild west of parking. (Even on a recent Thursday afternoon, it was difficult for L.A. Material’s reporters to find parking on the street.)

“People just double park!” Santamaria exclaimed. A minute later, she peered down the street conspiratorially at a man doing just that in a silver Mercedes sedan.

Manville, the UCLA professor of urban planning, said it is to be expected that a city as big as L.A. routinely issues erroneous tickets. In fact, L.A. Material’s analysis found that the city’s error rate is improving. 

“Obviously, that’s still very frustrating for somebody who gets a ticket in error,” Manville said.

Given three weeks to answer questions from L.A. Material, LADOT offered only one figure to support its claim that it makes residents whole. In 2025 alone, officials said, the city identified roughly 2,000 street sweeping tickets that were issued in error and voided the “vast majority” of them. 

But that number is unhelpful. It includes street sweeping tickets voided for any reason at all, including when officers issue citations despite last-minute sweeping cancellations. That year, L.A. Material’s analysis, which focused narrowly on tickets issued on scheduled no-sweeping weeks, found more than 1,600 bad tickets.

When asked for more specific data, LADOT spokesperson Makenzi Rasey said “that isn’t something we’ll provide.” The agency did not respond to repeated follow-up questions.

Mayor Karen Bass’s office did not respond to requests for comment. But a spokesperson for Councilmember Curren Price, whose district includes the South Park hotspot, said: “If the data confirms that tickets were issued in error, the city must take responsibility, identify what went wrong, and ensure affected residents have a path to be made whole.”

This isn’t the first time LADOT has issued bad tickets. In 2014, CBS found that officers were issuing tickets on days when street sweeping had been canceled. Then-Mayor Eric Garcetti said he was “pissed” about the citations, and directed the department to issue refunds.

About $1.1 million were eventually reimbursed to residents — only for CBS to find that LADOT officers were still issuing bum tickets.

Residents on the receiving end of parking tickets often gripe that the city is harvesting revenue from them. But in fact, it costs LADOT more to administer its parking enforcement program than it makes back in fines.

To make matters more confusing for residents, the sweeping schedule isn’t truly every other week. Most streets are swept on either the first and third weeks of the month, or the second and fourth, meaning that in some cases, when, say, a month has five Thursdays, sweepers skip two weeks in a row.

Take the below example. A sign on one side of the street bans parking on Wednesday afternoons.

This street is swept on only the first and third Wednesday of every month.

So if you’re trying to park here in July 2026 — and LADOT does its job correctly — you’re in luck. There are five Wednesdays this month, so you’ll get to skip one evening of scrambling extra hard for parking.

A small number of sweeping routes are weekly, and some streets aren’t swept at all. You can check the schedule for your street on this city website.

If you believe you’ve received an erroneous ticket, you can contest it online or by calling (866) 561-9742.

Did you get a bad ticket? Is there another traffic enforcement story we should look into? Contact Tomo Chien at [email protected] or tomo.213 on Signal.