Few people agree on most things, but D.C. residents and visitors alike often find common ground on one gripe: Parking and traffic tickets are plentiful and expensive.
But new proposals in the Wilson Building are reviving discussions around whether D.C. should reduce the fines associated with parking and traffic tickets, with some lawmakers contemplating fully cutting them in half while others propose doing away with the practice of doubling fines after 30 days.
“I do think we need to address this problem,” D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson said this week. “We are seeing tickets issued in much greater volume. In a sense that’s a good thing because there are bad drivers. However it means that fines are racked up quickly and are quite hefty. There are drivers that owe thousands of dollars. That’s not sustainable.”
Earlier this month, At-Large council member Robert White proposed halving all parking fines, which start as low as $20 for parking within five feet of an alley and can increase quickly thereafter: Parking in a restricted rush hour zone can fetch a $100 ticket, blocking an emergency snow route is $250 and excessive idling is $500.
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“Residents are drowning in costs,” White said. “[They] have to stretch every single paycheck further just to cover the basics. I’m hearing about this every day in every part of the city. A parking ticket can make the difference between covering bills and falling behind, but it is not just those making minimum wage who are feeling the squeeze and stressed by it right now.”
In the 2025 fiscal year, D.C. issued 1,093,880 parking tickets worth more than $59 million in fines. White said the average parking ticket fine that year was $59.20, which at the city’s current minimum wage would take more than three hours of work for some residents to pay off.
This week Ward 8 council member Trayon White — who has long argued that D.C.’s parking and traffic fines are too high — introduced a bill that would end the existing doubling of any fine if it’s not paid within 30 days of the ticket being issued.
“I believe that drivers should slow down and drive safely. We can hold motorists accountable without financially devastating them,” he said on Tuesday. “If I don’t have the money in 10 days I don’t have double the money after 30 days.”
Mendelson — who himself said he would favor cutting parking fines in half — said his colleagues should also look at the cost of tickets issued by the city’s many traffic cameras; those fines start at $100 and escalate rapidly, especially as a driver’s speeding gets more egregious. (In 2025 D.C.’s traffic cameras issued 3.3 million tickets.)
Still, the populist impulse to respond to D.C. residents’ affordability concerns would be costly, and past efforts to reduce fines have fallen short because of the fiscal reality that any reductions in revenue from the fines would lead to reduced spending on other programs and services.
“I’d love to see how we could reduce those things,” said Ward 6 council member Charles Allen, the chair of the council’s transportation committee. “The reality is, unless I have something to offset it — especially in lean budget years when we’re scrambling to help protect funding for child care and health care and housing — it makes it increasingly hard.”
The reason D.C. is virtually dependent on revenue from parking and traffic tickets has to do with the city budget. Every year the mayor and council craft a budget not just for the upcoming fiscal year but also the three that follow. Those budgets — which by law have to be balanced — are built on estimates of how much revenue the city is taking in, from traditional sources like taxes and fees but also parking and traffic tickets.
In 2025 the value of all fines from parking, traffic cameras and moving offenses amounted to more than $754 million, out of an annual budget hovering in the $11 billion range. That year, some $316 million worth of fines were actually paid. Reducing those fines would mean replacing the revenue the associated tickets were supposed to bring over four years.
“It’s hard to justify cutting tickets in half when we’re cutting education programs and food assistance,” said Ward 5 council member Zachary Parker earlier this month.
This is not a new political and fiscal reality for many council members. In 2018 the council actually passed a bill authored by Trayon White that would have changed the point at which an unpaid fine doubles, from 30 days to 60. It was never implemented, though, because it would have cost $111 million in revenue over four years.
Robert White’s idea of halving parking fines was estimated to cost D.C. between $10 and $20 million in revenue annually.
Lawmakers have tried to break the costly link between fines and the city’s broader budget. Within the past five years, the council mandated that fines from traffic cameras be invested only in traffic safety programs, but Mayor Muriel Bowser redirected the funds back into the general budget, where they have remained since.
Whether D.C.’s likely next mayor will do anything differently remains to be seen. Asked by The Washington Sun whether reducing parking and traffic fines would be on her radar, Ward 4 Council member Janeese Lewis George said there were more elements to consider than a ticket left on a windshield or mailed to a driver.
“We have to balance affordability and the conversation around enforcement and accountability,” she said. “We’ve also had a number of traffic crashes. We’ve lost lives. A number of times when we look up the tickets of the person who committed some of those dangerous behaviors they have a large amount of tickets. It’s a nuanced conversation.”
And one that she’s been hearing more and more about. “It’s the one thing people yell at me, they’ll say, ‘My tickets are too high!’” she added.
There have been other attempts to address the issue. Earlier this year D.C. implemented a pilot program where it gave a one-time 50% discount on minor traffic tickets to residents receiving food benefits, based on research showing that income-based fines can sometimes increase payment rates while promoting safer driving. A traffic safety bill authored by Allen and passed by the council in late 2024 would give residents a chance to take driver safety classes in lieu of paying $500 in traffic fines, but the program hasn’t been funded.
Trayon White has also introduced separate bills to address D.C.’s parking and traffic fines. One would expand the use of traffic amnesties, where the city waives fees and interest on unpaid fines during designated periods. Bowser ran a four-month amnesty in 2021, when more than 32,000 drivers settled tickets worth some $44 million in fines. Another of his bills would allow drivers to do community service in lieu of any fines they owe.
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