Business Goal

Business Goal

1. Assess the effectiveness of LADOT's digital communication plan in informing the public about street sweeping citations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
2. Determine if the communication plan prevented fines or generated fines.

Background

COVID-19 Impact on California: Street Sweeping Suspended

On March 16, 2020, the Mayor of Los Angeles relaxed parking enforcement across the city, temporarily halting the issuance of street sweeping citations. This suspension allowed residents to practice social distancing during the COVID-19 outbreak. Angelenos are typically required to move their parked vehicles to make way for routine sweeps; failure to do so results in a $73 citation. Source

City Council Votes to Resume Street Sweeping

Between September 30, 2020, and October 14, 2020, LADOT and City Council conducted public outreach to inform Angelenos about the resumption of street sweeping. The initial announcement was spread through Twitter by LADOT and City Council members, while news stations did not cover the story until October 15, 2020, or later. LADOT also placed flyers on windshields - Source

Data Dictionary

parking-citations.csv

Feature Name	Feature Description
issue_date	Citation date formatted as yyyy-mm-dd
issue_time	Citation time formatted as HH-MM-ss 24HR Military Time
rp_state_plate	State license plate of the vehicle i.e. CA, TX
plate_expiry_date	License plate expiration date. yyyy-mm-dd date format.
make	Car manufacturer ex. NISS is Nissan.
body_style	Body style of the car. PA is a Passenger vehicle with four doors.
color	Color of the vehicle.
location	The street name and number where the citation was issued.
route	Route that issued the citation.
agency	Issuing agency. See city-documents/LADOT/agency-names.pdf
violtion_code	Alphanumeric code used to indicate the type of violation.
violation_description	Short description of the parking citation.
fine_amount	Citation fee in $USD.
latitude	Latitude of the citation location.
longitude	Longitude of the citaiton location.
day_of_week	The day of the week the citation was issued.
issue_year	Year of the citation issue date.
issue_hour	Hour of the citation issue time. 24HR Military Time
issue_minute	Minute of the citation issue time.

City Documents

Access the Los Angeles City Council documents from the Los Angeles City Clerk's Office here.

Project Steps

Acquire

Parking Citation Data Download the dataset here stored as parking-citations.csv. The dataset contains approximately 7 years worth of parking citations issued in Los Angeles, California.

Text data

• Twitter: Los Angeles City Council and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation tweets. Requires a API Key and you'll need to apply for a developer account.

Prepare

Missing Values

• Dropped rows missing latitude and longitude data. 99999.0 indicated a null value.
• Dropped rows missing license plate expiration date.
• Dropped columns: vin, marked_time, color_description, body_style_description, agency_description, meter_id, ticker_number.
• Dropped rows with missing values.

Data Type Casting, Metric Conversion, and Formatting

• Converted all numeric date columns to datetime.
• Converted issue_time from a float to TimeStamp.
• Converted agency from a float to an integer.
• Converted latitude and longitude values from US Feet coordinates (NAD1983StatePlaneCaliforniaVFIPS0405_Feet projection) to standard coordinates using the folium and pyproj libraries.
• Removed capitalization and spacing from column names.

Feature Engineering

• Created a new column called day_of_week.
• Created a new column called issue_year.
• Created a new column called issue_hour.
• Created a new column called issue_minute.

Explore

City Council and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation Twitter Data

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation generated the most engagement related to parking enforcement.

• @LADOTofficial has 14.2K Twitter followers in a city with 3,145,520 adults, meaning less than 1% of adults in Los Angeles follow LADOT.
• Los Angeles City Council Members Nury Martinez, Curren D. Price Jr. and Joe Buscaino, tweeted once or not at all.
• Mayor Garcetti, @MayorOfLA, has 417.9K followers. That's more than all other city official twitter accounts combined. In the future, he or any mayor could share city service updates with the public using the mayoral Twitter account.

Street Sweeping Citations

Parking Citations

• Map of citations

Hypotheses

Were street sweeping fines collected from 10/15/2020 - 11/15/2020 significantly greater than average?

𝐻0: Fines collected from 10/15/2020 - 11/15/2020 are less than or equal to the average.

𝐻1: Fines collected from 10/15/2020 - 11/15/2020 are significantly greater than average.

Outcome:

Conclusions

How to Reproduce

Tools & Requirements

• pyproj

pip install pyproj

• folium

pip install folium

All files are reproducible and available for download and use.

• Read this README.md
• Clone this repository
• Acquire the dataset from Kaggle.
• Run Final-Report.ipynb