March 2025 brought some unwelcome news for Baltimoreans: The city was returning to 24-hour parking enforcement.

There are few mild inconveniences that produce such strong reactions as getting a parking ticket. And here were the city’s leaders unleashing its army of meter maids ‘round the clock to write more.

The move back to 24-hour enforcement — Baltimore was doing this before the COVID-19 pandemic — came after the city had seen ticket writing decline for years. A Baltimore Banner investigation published in January found that traffic enforcement officers wrote fewer tickets in 2024 than they did in 2021, when parking rules were suspended for half the year.

So, has the city’s pledge to step up enforcement actually panned out?

Transportation officers have issued nearly 280,000 citations through Dec. 12, according to publicly available data. They issued just 212,000 in all of 2024.

That increase in citations has meant an increase in revenue for Baltimore’s coffers. About $14.8 million worth of tickets have been issued so far this year, compared to about $12 million in 2024.

A host of reasons were behind the yearslong decline in ticket writing. There were a lot of vacancies and a human resources snafu meant entry-level positions couldn’t be filled. Guidance from the law department threw into doubt whether city employees could write tickets for expired citations. The city councilman charged with oversight of DOT called the agency “operationally beleaguered.”

Most of these problems are now fixed, said Veronica McBeth, director of Baltimore’s transportation department.

The overnight and weekend shifts have allowed her agency to better deploy workers where they’re needed. The human resources issue — the agency was requiring prior experience for entry-level positions which caused applications to be tossed out — has been fixed. Now there are just 13 vacancies city wide.

And, perhaps most importantly, Baltimore is writing tickets for vehicles with lapsed registrations.

Almost the entirety of 2025’s increase in citations can be attributed to the city’s writing tickets for expired tags again. Data show that enforcement in other categories, like parking in residential areas without a permit or not moving for street cleaning, has remained largely the same compared to 2024.

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.

Enforcement picked up in the second half of 2024 (as in it was actually happening) and gained steam throughout 2025.

As encouraging as the improvement is, Baltimore still lags behind its 2022 level of enforcement. Transportation workers wrote 322,000 citations to the tune of $16.1 million that year.

Investments in technological advances could help the city issue more tickets in the coming years. A pilot program testing license plate readers has been underway all year, and there are plans to expand it citywide, McBeth said. The kinks are still being worked out, but once it’s fully operational, a transportation worker will be able to drive up and down permit parking streets and issue tickets instantaneously.

In an interview, McBeth stressed that tickets are not just a revenue ploy. Really they’re about quality of life and the social order. Citations are what make people move their cars for street sweepers and keep folks from blocking fire hydrants and bus lanes. In permitted neighborhoods, they’re what keep people from circling the block for hours after work looking for a spot that might be taken by someone down at the corner bar.

“I know it’s contentious,” McBeth said. “Nobody wants to get a parking ticket. But you know, I think we all have experienced a moment where somebody has impacted us negatively, driving down the street, or double parking in front of us.”