It’s an age-old question: “Do you think I’m far away enough from the hydrant?” In 2023, New York City issued $79.2 million off of fire hydrant parking tickets, so we thought it was worth investigating.
The letter of the law says there should be an empty 30-foot space in front of a hydrant—15 feet on either side - about the length of two Honda Civic’s back-to-back. But, that’s much further than most people actually park.
To help answer the question of how far you really need to park away from a hydrant, we analyzed 1,003 fire hydrant tickets from the NYC OpenData website and looked at how far the hydrant parkers were who got ticketed.
Key Insights:
97% of tickets were written within 7 feet, even though the the law requires 15ft; if you park 7ft+, you’re very unlikely to get a ticket
62% of tickets were written for cars that were directly blocking the hydrant
The furthest ticket written was 11 feet - not a single ticket further than 11 feet!
Parking tickets in NYC must show how far away the car was parked from the hydrant—or at least, valid tickets do.
The most common distance from the hydrant was zero feet—as in, the car was fully blocking the hydrant. Needless to say, this is not a good place to park if you’re hoping to avoid a ticket, plus it’s an undeniable fire hazard. 62% of tickets were written for cars fully blocking a hydrant, and the remaining 38% of tickets werefor cars parked a lot closer to hydrants than the mandatory 15 feet.
It turns out that fewer than one in ten tickets (9.2%) went to cars that were more than five feet from a hydrant. Fewer than one in thirty (3.0%) was for parking beyond seven feet, and only one out of every hundred (0.7%) went to cars more than eight feet out.
Conclusion: If a Fiat can fit between you and a hydrant, you’re pretty safe.
That’s good news for New Yorkers for at least two reasons. The first, obviously, is that you’re not very likely to get a ticket if you’re far enough away from the hydrant to wonder if you’re far away enough.
The second is that the City does a pretty good job writing hydrant tickets when it matters, and letting citizens slide when it doesn’t. The National Fire Protection Association’s (NFPA) fire code only requires 3 or 5 feet of clearance, depending on the kind of connection the hydrant uses, and the additional space built in by cities depends on factors beyond those considered by the NFPA. This means that nine in ten hydrant tickets issued by the Parking Authority in NYC weren’t just for cars violating the City’s laws—they’re for cars going against a widely-recognized code.
At the end of the day, ticket officers are human, so if you think you’re far away enough from the hydrant, they probably do too. But if you aren’t far enough away and a City official does write you a ticket, hopefully they do it by hand.
That’s because handwritten tickets have high error rates.
Among the 72 handwritten tickets in our dataset, eight omitted the distance from the hydrant, two were illegible, two said “in front of,” and one eyebrow-raising ticket said “on it.” At least 10 of these 72 would have been dismissed had they been challenged (only one was challenged it was dismissed.)
Meanwhile, only 1 of the electronic tickets omitted the distance. The comparatively high likelihood that handwritten were invalid reflects a kind of win-win for both the City and its drivers. Drivers who score these tickets can save money, and the City can rest assured that it saved itself money by going digital.
We’d recommend that if you get a ticket that’s illegible or missing distance information, we fight it via our ticket fighting experts at PayNYCFines (or you can do it yourself) - there’s a very good chance it will be dismissed.
Until then, keep at least a Fiat distance between you and the hydrant!
Note: We don’t know anything about the vehicles that didn’t get tickets, so we can’t estimate your odds of getting written up versus not.
