Freedom of Information Act data help Sun steer readers away from problems
CHAD SKELTON
Sun
It’s Friday evening and you’re picking up some takeout food from your favourite restaurant on Commercial Drive.
You pull into a space right in front and wonder: Should I plug the meter?
After all, you’re only going to be a few minutes, 10 tops.
But is it worth risking a $ 60 ticket just to save a few cents?
If only there was some way of finding out what your chances are of getting a ticket. Now there is. Over the next three days, The Vancouver Sun will let you in on the secrets of parking in our increasingly crowded city.
Through the Freedom of Information Act, The Sun has obtained a computer database of every parking ticket written in the City of Vancouver since 2004: 1.6 million tickets in all.
Using that data, The Sun has been able to pinpoint which city blocks you’re most likely to get a ticket on and — with minute-by-minute precision — what times of day parking officers are at their busiest.
We’ll let you in on some tricks of the parking game, such as which days of the year there aren’t any parking officers on duty at all and why checking your tires for chalk isn’t a foolproof strategy.
And we’ll get to the truth of some of the urban myths of parking enforcement, such as whether parking officers have a daily ticket quota they have to fill and whether you can get a discount on your parking fines by going to court.
Beginning today, The Sun is also launching a series of online tools — at vancouversun. com/ parking/ — where you can get even more information about what parking enforcement is up to in your neighbourhood.
The site includes an interactive map, where you can see — block by block — where parking officers write the most tickets and an online database of all 1.6 million tickets that you can search yours elf by street address or licence plate number.
Over the coming days you’ll also meet:
The parking officer who takes his job so seriously he writes twice as many tickets a day as some of his colleagues.
The people who fight their parking tickets in court and the judicial justices of the peace who decide whether or not to give them a break.
The famous Vancouver businessman who has racked up more than 200 parking tickets, many of them at the meter right in front of his office.
The database obtained by The Sun includes only municipal parking offences, such as expired meters, stopping in nostopping zones or parking in a residential spot without a permit.
Fines received in off-street parking lots — whether owned by the city or a private company — are not included.
So what about that meter on Commercial Drive?
The city’s parking enforcement unit acknowledges that meters in “ isolated” locations such as Commercial Drive or Kerrisdale are checked far less frequently than those in the downtown core.
That’s because while there are dedicated foot patrols checking meters downtown, those along Commercial are the responsibility of officers in cars covering a much larger area.
So while a downtown meter might get passed by a parking officer every couple of hours, some meters on Commercial are checked as rarely as once a day.
As a result, while a busy downtown block might see up to 20 expired-meter tickets a week, a typical block on Commercial has just two or three.
Parking at an unpaid meter is always a gamble, of course.
But your odds are a lot better on Commercial than downtown.
Where and when you’re most likely to get ticketed, based on a review of 1.6 million parking tickets issued in Vancouver since 2004