LA Issued Thousands of Bogus Street Sweeping Tickets — Here's How to Check If Yours Was One

Yes, it's real: Los Angeles issued thousands of street sweeping tickets on weeks when the street wasn't actually scheduled to be swept, and the city has now confirmed it. If you've gotten a street sweeping citation in the past few years, it's worth a second look before you assume it was legitimate.

What the investigation found

An investigation by the outlet LA Material found that the LA Department of Transportation issued more than 12,500 street sweeping citations on days when no sweeping was scheduled on that block — worth close to $1 million in fines. Most residential streets in LA are only posted for sweeping every other week, alternating 1st/3rd or 2nd/4th weeks of the month. The tickets in question were written on the "off" week, when parking was actually legal.

LADOT's own position, on the record, had been that the department "occasionally issues tickets in error" but "proactively dismisses" them and sends drivers who already paid instructions for a refund. A follow-up investigation tested that claim against the city's own data and found it mostly wasn't happening — thousands of the flagged citations were still sitting on the books, uncancelled, months later.

The city's response

After the follow-up reporting, LADOT spokesperson Colin Sweeney confirmed the department is now "conducting an audit of sweeping citations and will reimburse any paid citations determined to have been issued in error." That's a real commitment, but it's also the city auditing itself after being caught — not a proactive refund program. Nobody is mailing checks out unprompted. If you want your money back, you'll have to go find out whether your ticket was one of the bad ones.

Why this is so easy to get wrong in the first place

This isn't a story about corrupt enforcement — it's a story about how fragile the biweekly schedule is to keep straight, even for the agency running it. Every posted sweeping sign in LA lists a day and a frequency (1st/3rd Tuesday, 2nd/4th Thursday, etc.), and a citation has to match both the sign and the actual schedule for that specific week. When a route gets rescheduled, combined with another route, or affected by a holiday shift, the paperwork and the enforcement officer's handheld unit don't always update in sync. The result is a ticket that looks completely normal — right street, right day of the week — but was issued on a week the block was never actually swept.

How to check if your ticket was one of them

Start with your own citation:

• Pull up the exact date and block on your citation.
• Check your block's posted sweeping frequency — is it the 1st/3rd week or 2nd/4th week of the month? — against the calendar date you were ticketed. If your citation date falls on the "off" week for your block's posted schedule, that's the specific error this investigation flagged.
• If you're not sure what your block's actual schedule is, look up the sign nearest where you were parked rather than relying on memory — schedules can differ block to block and even side to side on the same street.

If the math doesn't line up — you were ticketed on a week your block wasn't due for sweeping — you likely have a legitimate, evidence-backed case, not just a hunch.

How to actually get it dismissed or refunded

This goes through the same official channel as any other citation dispute, not a special scandal-specific form. LADOT's citation review process starts with a free initial review — online through the LADOT Parking Violations Bureau, by phone, by mail, or in person — filed within 21 days of the citation (or 14 days from a delinquency notice, whichever is longer). State plainly that the citation was issued on a week your block's posted schedule shows no sweeping, and ask for the posted schedule to be checked against the citation date. If the citation is older than the appeal window, you can still contact LADOT directly to flag it for the ongoing audit, since the city has already said it will reimburse confirmed errors — but a review filed inside the normal deadline is the more reliable path.

Keep a photo of the posted sign and a note of the date you checked it. It's the same evidence that wins any street sweeping dispute, and it's what turns "I think this was wrong" into something a reviewer can actually act on.

The bigger pattern

Street sweeping is already the single biggest source of parking tickets in LA — a predictable, recurring cost for anyone who street-parks. This story doesn't change the rules; it's a reminder that even a system built entirely around a fixed, published schedule can get the schedule wrong on its own end. Worth remembering next time a ticket shows up that doesn't quite match what you expected.

Curbswap moves your car before your actual posted sweeping window so there's no ticket to double-check in the first place — a vetted driver relocates it to a legal spot and sends photo and GPS proof. It's rolling out neighborhood by neighborhood in Los Angeles.