The City of Toronto has decided to cancel 880,000 parking tickets after finally doing some math around the issue for the first time in 13 years.
Each ticket would have grossed less than $23 on the off chance someone actually paid the fine while court costs, derived from drivers who fight tickets, would have amounted to around $26 per ticket. Fines contested in court were usually of modest sums, which deemed them a low priority and therefor created a major backlog.
The withdrawn tickets represent about three per cent of all tickets issued since 2012, which means around 29,304,000 parking tickets were issued in total. Which is insane.
Mayor John Tory, meanwhile, was completely unaware of the decision – people not being held to account “makes a mockery of the parking laws,” he said. The now-void tickets could have brought in up to $20 million in revenue, to which Tory added, “it’s not just about the money, it’s also about the fact it allows people to kind of get away with just ignoring [tickets].”
The technical reason behind pulling the tickets was because they had outlasted Charter requirements for a trial within a reasonable time.
Don’t cling to any hope of beating the system by virtue of patience, though. The City of Toronto enacted a fixed-fine system in last year that means people can no longer hope for a reduction in court.
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