Years ago, before the coronavirus pandemic shut governments down and reframed collective expectations for city service delivery, street cleaning on Alvonia Allen’s block went like clockwork.

The northbound lanes of Wildwood Parkway in Edmondson Village would be cleaned on Thursday mornings, the southbound lanes a day later. Enforcement officers with the city Department of Transportation, the people who enforce Baltimore’s parking laws, would go up and down the parkway both mornings and put tickets on vehicles not moved in time.

That was then. Now it’s a rare occurrence for Allen to see a transportation enforcement officer in her neighborhood.

“It’s gotten to the point it’s so lax that people don’t worry about moving their cars anymore,” Allen said.

Last spring, city officials said parking enforcement was a priority, both for the public good and the budget. Yet transportation officers are writing far fewer citations than they have in years past, according to a Baltimore Banner review of enforcement data.

Transportation officers wrote more than 322,000 parking tickets in 2022, the first full year after pandemic restrictions were lifted. In 2024, they wrote fewer than 220,000, a decrease of almost a third, data shows. Enforcement declined so dramatically in 2024 that it sank below 2021 levels, when many parking rules were suspended for more than half the year.

That drop-off coincides with myriad issues within the Department of Transportation’s enforcement division, from a human resources blunder to potentially bad legal advice.

These issues have cost the city money. Parking officers wrote $4 million less in citations in 2024 than in 2022, data shows.

Ryan Dorsey, the newly appointed chair of the council’s Land Use and Transportation Committee, called the city’s parking enforcement “operationally beleaguered,” and scheduled an oversight hearing on the issue for early February.

Mayor Brandon Scott’s office directed questions to the city Department of Transportation, which did not respond to multiple inquiries over the last month. On Tuesday evening, a DOT spokesperson sent a response that said, in part, the agency expected to issue citations at a higher rate going forward.

“Something is just kind of deeply broken and not functioning in the way it’s supposed to,” Councilman Mark Parker, who represents Southeast Baltimore, which has a high volume of 311 complaints about parking, said about the drop-off in enforcement.

Residents across Baltimore, whether in Edmondson Village, Poppleton, Fells Point or Federal Hill, have taken notice. People purposefully park illegally just to see how long it takes to get a parking ticket.

In Federal Hill, the neighborhood association has monitored the parking situation with hawk-like vigilance. Its members have compiled statistics and generated their own reports to share with transportation officials, sometimes with little acknowledgement, interim neighborhood association president Locchanan Sreeharikesan said.

Many residents there will circle their blocks for hours looking for a space, but are unable to find one because of wrongly parked vehicles.

“There’s not a shortage of parking in the city, there’s just a lack of enforcement,” Sreeharikesan said.

Sometimes framed as a revenue issue by people in City Hall, it’s also a safety issue, Parker said. Cars may park too close to intersections, making it hard to see pedestrians or oncoming traffic; they may block school crosswalks; they may block fire hydrants.

As annoying as it can be to get a ticket, residents are just as annoyed at the consequences of being too lenient or apathetic about enforcement. Maybe it’s the standstill downtown traffic because cars are parked in rush hour lanes. Or maybe you’re like Sonia Eaddy, a longtime resident and activist in Poppleton, who has noticed how abandoned vehicles have increasingly become a nuisance for her West Side neighborhood.

Nick Johnson, a Fells Point resident and owner of the Su Casa furniture store on Bond Street, counts more expired license plates on the road every day.

“I think parking enforcement is about order and chaos, and when you really do it, you encourage a sense of order that I think then carries over to other things,” Johnson said. “And without that parking enforcement, there’s that much more chaos because anything goes.”

There are several factors that could explain the ticketing decline.

Staffing in the parking enforcement division plummeted in the summer of 2023, and city officials were struggling to hire new officers, city records show. Part of the difficulty was a requirement on entry-level positions requiring previous experience. That means that an application submitted to the city with no enforcement experience listed was automatically rejected for a position that didn’t require any.

City Administrator Faith Leach told council members on Jan. 13 that human resources had corrected that error and the city went on a hiring spree. The transportation department went on an enforcement “blitz” in December, Leach said, and wrote significantly more tickets that month compared to December 2023.

However, the city still issued fewer citations in December 2024 than in 2021 or 2022.

Another reason for fewer citations could be that more parking enforcement staff are being used to direct traffic at busy intersections downtown during rush hour.

Some have questioned whether transportation enforcement officers are being deployed properly, at the right places or during the right hours. Fewer officers work in the evenings and on weekends than during the daytime on weekdays; hardly any work the overnight hours.

“There are a lot of people who just believe that after 5 o’clock on a weekday, and after 5 on a Friday there’s literally zero enforcement for what you do parking wise,” Councilman Paris Gray said.

While citations for almost every kind of violation the transportation department enforces is down, no category of enforcement fell off like expired tags.

In 2022, parking enforcement officers wrote 78,187 tickets for vehicles with past-due registrations. In 2024, they wrote 17,312. From November 2023 to June 2024, parking officers wrote just 133 tickets for expired tags.

Dorsey said he thinks he knows why.

Department leadership made a deliberate decision to stop writing the tickets, Dorsey said, because of a “bizarre” and “shitty” Law Department opinion that suggested the transportation department only had authority to issue citations for expired tags during traffic stops, and that only the police could issue such tickets to parked vehicles.

There was an obvious problem with that interpretation: Transportation enforcement officers do not make traffic stops. Police do.

“I spent like months beating my head against the wall trying to get DOT to be more sensible about it,” Dorsey said. The transportation department initially did not respond to questions about the opinion but later acknowledged its existence.

Shortly after he went to the Law Department about it, Dorsey said, it retracted the advice. Leach separately became aware of the lack of enforcement and demanded improvement, Dorsey said. Enforcement for expired plates resumed in July 2024 but has not returned to pre-November 2023 levels, data shows.

Another reason the city may have backed off on enforcement is not tied to staffing or legal advice. At a May 2024 budget hearing, former-Councilman Eric Costello grilled transportation officials about the lack of enforcement goals included in their agency’s budget proposal.

Leach, who oversees that agency and several others, stepped in and said setting goals could look “predatory.” If anything, she said, the city would want to see less citations year over year. A month earlier, a finance official at a different hearing said the city would be stepping up its enforcement in an effort to generate more revenue to help balance the budget.

Allen, an Edmondson Village-area resident for 40 years, said while her neighborhood might not be as posh as others, she deserves decent services all the same.

“Regardless if it’s parking tickets, street cleaning, whatever it is, I’m paying my taxes just like people in Bolton Hill,” Allen said. “I should get the same services that I’m entitled to that they do.”

Data reporter Greg Morton contributed to this story.