Thursday, April 16, 2009

Out-of-towners park free?

In the news this week, it was revealed that Toronto has no way of collecting parking tickets given to cars with plates from outside Ontario.

Because the city has been unable to access data held by jurisdictions outside Ontario, it can't find out the name or address of a vehicle's owner to try to collect the outstanding fine.

The city is apparently considering polite windshield notices asking offenders to be good while in the city. Har!

Now does this mean when I visit cities outside of Ontario I can park with impunity there?

6 comments:

Barbara Bruederlin said...

I am getting in the car and driving to Toronto RIGHT NOW!

mister anchovy said...

I got a ticket once in Calgary for speeding, but I paid it.

Candy Minx said...

This seems to happen everywhere. I wonder if it's more expensive to chase down offenders than to let it go?

Another example of weird parking and driving is that say someone lives rural or suburban...in a lot of cities those people dive downtown and they have much lower taxes than those people who live in urban houses. But urban people never drive to the suburbs or rual (or at least very rarely).

We need to figure out how to get taxes and support from the people who drive from outlying cvommunities to urban centers...usually more traffic than those who live within cities. Example: if I go to a hockey game I take the public transit. All of the folks who drive downtown...perhaps there should be a tax on the tickets for games? Or a toll booth? Or higher taxes for people who use up animal habitats and use the roads instead of living in urban centers?

mister anchovy said...

Things change, and in Toronto today, some assumptions that might have been true just a few years ago may not be true today. I read articles in all the local papers recently suggesting that Toronto is in danger of becoming a bedroom community for the suburbs. There is less and less industry in the city. I suppose I'm an example of this. I live in 416 but work in 905. I've also read recently that traffic patterns have shifted to the point that the traffic both in and out of the city is becoming comparable during both rush hours of the day.

It's also quite a generalizatin to say that people who live in urban areas don't drive to rural areas. We drive to Richmond Hill to visit Tuffy's dad, and sometimes to the Tuffy family cottage and sometimes to visit Tuffy's brother in Uxbridge. I've recently visited my sister in Hockley. Tomorrow morning, we're driving to Mount Forest to visit our pup. I go fly fishing north and northwest of the city fairly regularly. I'm not that unusual.

I don't know about other cities; however, property taxes are lower in Toronto than they are in the surrounding suburbs by a significant amount. Business taxes may be higher. Car insurance is less expensive in rural areas than in urban areas.

Candy Minx said...

I think everything that you have noted supports the idea of pricing road uses. I HOPE the taxes are still lower in Toronto than outlying rural areas. That keeps the life of the city pulsing. It is very dangerous when cities become unsupported by the rural areas. In the 90's a cuouple of politicians resented the lower taxes of downtown Toronto residents so they expanded the urban sprawl to be part of the city. It got nicknamed "megacity". Richmond Hill is really only barely outside of the decade old tax plot.

The aim is to reduce all this driving around. It's ridiculous that public transit has barely improved in Toronto and it's habitat encroachments. I took the Go train several places in the past summer and it hasn't improved or had enough buses added since the 80's. It's ridiculous.

My point was that there are complex commuting patterns and services should be put in place to support the lifeblood of the cities not to favour urban sprawl. I was mediumly enthused by the idea of pricing road use...but after reading your comment...I see toll booths might be of grave necessity the sooner the better. And the reason I am open-minded about adopting toll booths is because it is my experience that people get defensive about their driving habits. With pricing road uses then we don't need to bother and fuss over stats of who uses a road which way most. Perhaps we could have avoided the disaster of the 90's redfining the metropollitan area if we had chosen toll charges over extending the city boundaries.

Since the Toronto administrations efficency has dropped massively since the megacity changes ten years ago...it's going to be a terrible challenge to get such a dispersed population over mileage, with less consilience of purpose, to act like a community.

:(

Gardenia said...

Uh probably not. You NEVER want to get a ticket in New Orleans, they hunt you down like a possum.