Where drivers get parking tickets in the Big Apple says a lot about where they’re from.
Transplants and visitors who drive to New York City are more likely to park in certain neighborhoods depending on what state they hail from — with Californians flocking to trendy Brooklyn neighborhoods and New Jerseyans flooding Midtown Manhattan, according to an analysis of parking tickets.
Out-of-state drivers were hit with 23.4 percent of all parking summonses issued between August 2013 and March 2014, according to Pratt Institute Professor Ben Wellington, whose analysis revealed geographical trends.
Drivers with California license plates were more likely to be ticketed in hip Brooklyn nabes like Greenpoint and Bushwick than in other parts of the city, data show.
“Going in, I was unsure how different each state’s profile would be,” Wellington said. “But the results were quite telling.
“Once I saw the California-Brooklyn connection, I knew I was on to something.”
The analysis also revealed other demographic patterns, showing that drivers whose cars have a license plate from Southern states like North Carolina and Georgia are more likely to be ticketed in Brooklyn neighborhoods like East Flatbush, Brownsville and East New York.
Drivers with New York plates, on the other hand, were more likely to be ticketed in the farthest reaches of the outer boroughs.
“It’s demographically driven,” said Robert Sinclair, a spokesman for AAA. “They tend to settle here, then when they get visitors, the visitors get tickets here.”
The analysis also found that Connecticut drivers were most frequently summonsed in the nearby Bronx, while drivers from Massachusetts tend to be ticketed on the Upper West Side.
Mitchell Moss, director of the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation, said that people who drive or move to New York are likely to go places where there are people who are similar to them.
“It’s more likely that someone from California is going to have people in Greenpoint or Williamsburg than on the Upper West Side, which is a much more stated neighborhood,” he said. “Greenpoint is an exciting, trendy place . . . so it’s going to attract a certain type of person.
“It makes sense that someone from Massachusetts is going to visit someone from the Upper West Side,” Moss added. “Boring people gather together.”
Moss said people with Jersey plates ticketed on Midtown’s west side were most likely commuters looking to dump their vehicles as soon as they crossed the Hudson.
However, any patterns in out-of-state tickets must be taken with a grain of salt, Wellington said.
Some drivers, for instance, may actually live in New York but have their vehicles registered elsewhere to save money on insurance, according to a 2011 state Senate report. But proving that an out-of-towner is actually a New Yorker is tricky, making it difficult to enforce the law.
“Even with open questions like this, data of this sort could be used by the city to track things like tourism, relocation and possibly fraud,” Wellington said.