The Average L.A. Parking Ticket Is $90. In Hancock Park It's $197.

A bus-lane camera on Wilshire Boulevard, not heavier enforcement, is what pushes the Hancock Park average past $197.

A parking ticket in Hancock Park costs $197.42 on average, more than triple the $63.94 average in Sherman Oaks. Both numbers come from Crosstown, which read more than a decade of citation and fine records kept by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation against the city's budgets. Citywide, the average ticket runs $89.74.

No fine changes at a neighborhood line. An expired meter costs $63 wherever you leave the car. What changes is your odds of drawing an expensive one. Wilshire Boulevard runs along the southern edge of Hancock Park, and a camera aboard the 720 bus cites lane blockers there at $293 a time.

The rest of the spread works the same way, Crosstown found. The costly violations are rare and specific:

• $363 for parking in a disabled space
• $1,000 for a commercial vehicle left on a public street
• $1,100 for misusing a disabled placard

That last figure is the state ceiling. The Los Angeles City Council went to it in May 2019, after the Department of Motor Vehicles turned up over a thousand cases of drivers misusing placards. Where the cheap violations dominate, the averages sink: the Sepulveda Basin comes in at $60.66, which is $136.76 below Hancock Park.

Metro buses began carrying windshield cameras in February 2025 to catch drivers sitting in bus lanes, Crosstown reported. The first two routes were the 720 on Wilshire and the 212 on La Brea Avenue, and three more lines have been added since. The program's first year produced 115,890 citations. The fines assessed on them came to $19.6 million.

Officers were writing about 570 bus-lane tickets a month. The cameras write roughly 9,650.

Bus-lane violations make up 6.5% of the citations issued citywide so far in 2026, Crosstown found. The fines attached to them top $15 million, better than a fifth of everything the city assesses in tickets.

The city needs it. Parking enforcement once threw off tens of millions of dollars in surplus, but the cost of running it passed the money coming in during 2017, Crosstown reported. By fiscal year 2025 the gap ran past $50 million. Facing a deficit approaching $1 billion, the City Council raised meter rates by half in October 2025. The rate is now $1.50 an hour, and in the busiest areas the meters run until midnight.

Los Angeles projects $125.6 million in parking fines this fiscal year. A transportation department study delivered around the time of the meter increase found the fines mostly fit the seriousness of the violations, though a few could be tuned so more people actually pay. Cutting the blocked-driveway fine from $68 to $53 was one of them. That change would bring in $113,534 more a year, the department argued.

About 100 buses carry the equipment now. Metro wants roughly 300 more fitted out, and the transportation department has asked for cameras on city DASH buses as well. Eagle Rock sits near the bottom of the table because there's nowhere there to commit the expensive violations, but Metro broke ground in April 2026 on a rapid bus line with dedicated center lanes on Colorado Boulevard. Construction is due to reach the neighborhood in fall 2026, with service expected before the 2028 Olympics. Whether the cameras follow isn't settled.

The state law authorizing camera enforcement expires January 1, 2027. A bill to make it permanent, AB 1837, had cleared the Assembly and every Senate committee and was waiting on a floor vote as of August 20, 2026.

Source: xtown.la, retrieved September 24, 2026.