Learn your parking bylaws - or pay up

Linda McAvoy

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

It's a new personal record: two parking tickets in less than five days.

I seem to be working my way across the Niagara Region one parking ticket at a time.

The first one I simply chalked up to being a mom. Instead of dropping off Eldest Son at the St. Catharines bus station, I spent a few extra moments visiting with him while he waited on the departures platform – the perfect vantage point, it turns out, from which to watch as a parking control officer slapped a ticket on my truck.

Paying attention to my son, and not the parking meter, cost me $9.

"Who doesn't offer online payment in this day and age?" I fumed, stomping over to city hall to take advantage of the cheaper early-payment option.

Apparently not the City of Welland, either, as I discovered days later after receiving my second ticket – a $20 fine levied while I was busy squinting at an optometrist's eye chart.

This one was for parking within 1.5 metres of a driveway. Note, that's not blocking a driveway but parking too close to one, which seemed a truly petty prosecution, since my truck was so darn close to being legal a measuring tape would've been required – which is exactly what witnesses report the officer had wielded.

That bylaw apparently applies to all roads in the region, yet goes widely unenforced, except that it seems I'd parked smack in the middle of a neighbourhood zoning dispute. Hence the overly attentive bylaw officer.

However, ignorance of the law excuses no parking violator and, as the nice lady at parking control so helpfully pointed out, the law does not require that parking restriction signs be posted on every street.

So the moral of this story is, no, not to choose your healthcare professionals based on the availability of parking, but rather, to know your bylaws.

Granted, most drivers are painfully familiar with the more common parking offences.

Witness the fact that of the 2,888,234 parking tickets issued in the City of Toronto in 2007 (a couple of which I believe were mine), the top two categories, representing almost 44 per cent of all tickets issued, were "expired meter" offences and "no parking" offences, in which drivers chose to park despite the restrictions clearly posted (?) on nearby signs.

While most of us may know enough to park facing the correct direction, and not within three metres of a fire hydrant, checking out a city's parking website could spare you the $15 fine for parking more than 30 cm from a curb (Toronto), or compel you to take the "for sale" sign out of your car before parking on a Mississauga street ($25).

But if parking enforcement does end up plastering your windshield, know that – angry though you might be – biting the shoulder of the issuing officer is ill-advised and will only end up getting you arrested on criminal charges, as it did recently for an irate Winnipeg motorist.

Remember, too, that ignoring parking tickets will lead to trouble when it's licence-plate renewal time, so either pay up immediately or get yourself a court date.

Then again, you could commemorate your first parking ticket ever by excavating the entire section of a city street, including the parking meter, street sign, grass and sidewalk, encasing it in a hermetically sealed chamber and turning it into an art installation, as did American artist Tavares Strachan.

Too bad Strachan didn't get his ticket in Vancouver, since the city offers courtesy cancellation of first-time parking meter tickets – but only one per licence plate, and as long as there aren't any outstanding fines already against that plate.

lmcavoy@mcavoy.com

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