The number of parking tickets has plunged in cash-strapped Toronto. Why the lax enforcement?

The big number

1.8 million

the estimated number of parking tickets issued in Toronto in 2022. The number of tickets remains down significantly from the 2.2 million tickets handed out pre-pandemic, in 2019.

As Toronto city hall struggles to deal with a major fiscal shortfall, your local government is scrounging for cash nearly anywhere it can get it.

Before he resigned, former mayor John Tory pushed through a budget with a total seven per cent residential property tax increase — the biggest hike in amalgamated Toronto’s history. TTC fares are set to go up next month too. And fare enforcement officers are returning to the system in droves, looking to stick people who don’t tap their Presto card with fines as high as $425. Even the Bike Share system is proposing to see an increase, with a $6 annual hike for members and a new per-minute charge for e-bikes.

But there’s one notable municipal revenue area that’s avoiding this kind of drive to generate more cash: parking.

City hall and Toronto police continue to take a light touch with drivers who park illegally.

A report to last week’s meeting of the Toronto Police Services Board revealed that the cops and the city’s bylaw enforcement officers combined to issue a projected 1.8 million parking tickets in 2022. That’s up 23 per cent over 2021 — a year with a lot of pandemic restrictions — but remains way down from the 2.2 million tickets handed out during the last full pre-pandemic year in 2019.

The comparison gets worse when you rewind further. Parking tickets were on the decline even before COVID. In 2011, for example, Toronto drivers got 2.8 million tickets. Go back even further and there were several years when Toronto crossed the three million ticket mark.

As you’d expect, the slowdown in the number of parking tickets issued has some pretty serious revenue implications. The city’s annual revenue from parking tickets fell from $124 million in 2019 to an estimated $90 million in 2021. Depending on where final figures come in for 2022, the gap in revenue — money city hall could really use right now — will likely remain somewhere between $10 million and $20 million.

Why the decline? The police cite recent changes to city streets that resulted in fewer on-street parking spaces in some places — like the CaféTO restaurant patio program and the installation of more bike lanes. The city has also made it easier for drivers to pay for parking (and extend their meter time) with the Green P app, which could be a factor.

But I find it hard to accept that there’s no opportunity for city hall to make significantly more money off parking.

Toronto’s growing network of bike lanes, for example, would seem to create all kinds of revenue potential from ticketing people who park in them. It’s behaviour that is both obnoxious and dangerous. But the report to the police board says enforcement officers handed out just 8,283 parking tickets for bike lane violations in 2022, way down from the 16,882 tickets they issued in 2021.

The numbers are going in the wrong direction. Ask any cyclist and they’ll tell you how common it is to encounter a bike lane obstructed by a car. Officers — or an automated camera system — could be handing out hundreds of these kinds of tickets a day.

The fines imposed by Toronto’s parking tickets are also crying out for a review. The $150 ticket designated for parking in a bike lane — something that could literally cause a serious or even fatal injury — seems ridiculously low.

Also ridiculous is the fact that Toronto’s $30 ticket for an expired parking meter hasn’t budged in more than a decade, even as inflation has driven up the cost of seemingly everything else. The fines are low enough that the last time I wrote about parking, I heard from some clever scofflaws who said they’ve found it more cost-effective to almost never pay for parking and just accept the occasional $30 ticket.

Who can blame them? The ticket amount is low enough that it’s hardly a deterrent, and the enforcement numbers suggest they’ve got a decent chance of getting away without a ticket.

But it’s frustrating to hear stories like this in a city that is simultaneously crying poor when it comes to providing services like offering warm spaces for the homeless. When so many people are struggling, it’s hard not to notice who’s still living — and parking — on easy street.

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