Car Color and Parking Tickets (at UGA)

In my continuing mission to mine UGA parking ticket data from the last academic year, we turn today to the color of the car and number of tickets written. This is what I do while waiting for my ride home.

The hard part of this analysis is clear. I don't know how many red or black cars there are on campus, plus cars off campus can also get a ticket. In other words, if black cars get the most tickets (they do), that may simply be a function of there being more black cars available on campus -- therefore they get more tickets.

So how do we deal with this problem? We turn to Wikipedia, of course.

This Wikipedia page lists the North America popularity of car colors. It actually has two rankings from two sources, both similar. Below I compare the ranking of North American popularity of car color (using the Dupont Paint list) with the ranking of the number of tickets written on campus last academic year.

The Rank	American Popularity	Tickets on UGA Campus
1	Black	Black
2	Silver	White
3	White	Silver
4	Gray	Gray
5	Red	Blue

As you can see, the lists are remarkably similar. The difference in white and silver is small on the popularity list and very close in tickets written as well. Call it a tie.

You budding methodologists out there see the problem, of course. What's popular in North America isn't necessarily the same pool we're drawing from for cars that happen to park illegally on the University of Georgia campus during the 2015-2016 academic year. Yup, call that a limitation. A caveat. A problem. Other than that, it's kinda interesting that the lists are so similar. And red cars don't make the Top Five at UGA (it's number 6, by the way).

What's it all mean? That I'll do anything to play with data.