Baltimore’s Department of Transportation will enforce parking rules on a 24-hour basis starting March 10, city officials said Wednesday.

By switching to 24-hour enforcement, city officials hope to step up DOT’s productivity and deliver a service many residents say has been lacking in recent years. Mayor Brandon Scott said in a news release that the decision was “necessary to give our communities the attention they deserve.”

The move comes on the heels of a Baltimore Banner article in January that showed parking enforcement had fallen off a cliff. The city wrote fewer parking tickets in 2024 than in 2021, when parking rules were largely suspended for more than half the year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A 24-hour schedule, which would be broken into four slightly overlapping shifts, will help officers get to more “hot spots” where enforcement doesn’t always happen but where the department knows offenses are happening, DOT Director Veronica McBeth said at a City Council hearing on the issue in February.

McBeth even brought up her own neighborhood, where she has seen abandoned vehicles.

“We have not been allowed to, per se, be in the driver’s seat with how we deliver our traffic enforcement in some ways,” McBeth said at the February hearing.

The transportation department has struggled mightily to hire and retain parking enforcement officers. Part of the difficulty was that entry-level positions required 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.

A legal opinion that said the department didn’t have the authority to write citations for expired tags did not help, either.

In spring of 2024, top members of the Scott administration said parking enforcement was a priority for the city and that increased citations would help generate revenue. But parking officers wound up writing $4 million fewer citations in 2024 than in 2022, data shows.

City Administrator Faith Leach said earlier this year that DOT went on an enforcement blitz in December after cleaning up its human resource problems, hiring more officers and resuming expired-tag enforcement.

Transportation officers wrote more citations in December 2024 than in the same month for 2023, but still fewer than in 2022 or 2021, data shows.

Enforcement in 2025 is eclipsing 2024 figures for the same time period, but only barely. Enforcement still lags behind recent high-water marks in 2022.

DOT officers wrote 32,993 citations through Feb. 27 of this year. They wrote 30,428 in the first two months of 2024, publicly available data shows.

Banner reporter Daniel Zawodny contributed to this article.