Looking at the Past Six Months of Parking Enforcement in Troy
Vol. IV. No, 57 - Are we seeing a new trend or just a blip?
Each month, the city’s Police Department puts a report in a council packet about their activities and some of the most interesting data is about parking enforcement. Six months ago, this publication reported that parking enforcement in Troy had all but disappeared. Halfway through 2026, the story has an unexpected wrinkle worth flagging directly.
Parking Tickets In Troy Have All But Disappeared
When you look at the numbers coming from the Troy Police Department, a quiet story begins to unfold. For several years, Troy’s parking ticket activity has been falling, step by steady step, until alm…
What the Numbers Show
From January through June 2026, the Troy Police Department wrote 67 parking tickets total. That’s still a small number by historical standards, but it’s not nothing — and the pattern behind it is worth a closer look.
Most of that activity came in a single month. June alone accounted for 43 tickets written, making it the largest single month for parking enforcement since July 2024, when the department wrote 56. Every other month this year has stayed in the single digits or low teens: January saw 6, February 7, April 10, May just 5.
Two months — February and March 2026 — show no reliable figures for tickets written. Based on the information available, this appears to be a technical issue with the department’s data software rather than a genuine reporting gap or a deliberate withholding of information.
The obvious question is whether June’s jump is a one-month anomaly or the first sign that enforcement is picking back up after two years of decline. One month of data isn’t enough to say either way, and it isn’t worth guessing. What can be said is that this is the first month in nearly two years that has looked meaningfully different from the surrounding trend line, and that alone makes it worth watching.
Zooming out, the longer arc hasn’t changed. Tickets written peaked in 2023 at 1,527 for the full year, generating $28,110 in revenue. That fell by more than half in 2024, and again in 2025, when the city wrote just 261 tickets for the entire year. Even with June’s uptick, 2026 is still on pace to land well below any of the prior five years.
Revenue has tracked the same curve — down from a 2023 peak of $28,110 to under $5,000 in all of 2025, and just over $800 through the first half of this year.
Why Parking Enforcement Is Still Worth Watching
Parking enforcement isn’t a headline-grabbing issue. It doesn’t come with a budget vote or a public hearing. And while not many people are talking about parking now, it’s just a matter of time until the issue comes up again — parking is one of those cyclical issues that tends to bubble up every time and again.
Why? Becuase it’s exactly the kind of quiet, recurring city function that tells you something about how a department operates day to day, and it’s easy for that kind of data to fade from public attention simply because nobody’s tracking it consistently.
That’s the role this report plays. This pubication is not assigning motive to the numbers or claiming to know what’s behind June’s increase. This publication is simply putting the data in front of readers so that residents — whether business owners downtown, drivers who’ve noticed more or less enforcement, or anyone simply curious about how city revenue is trending — have the actual numbers rather than a guess.
This publication will look at this data again in August, once July’s data is available, to see whether June’s jump was the start of a trend or just a single busy month.
The numbers: Parking tickets written peaked at 1,527 in 2023, fell to 728 in 2024, dropped to 261 in 2025, and totaled 67 through the first half of 2026 — including 43 in June alone, the strongest single month since July 2024.
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