Craig, who lives in Burlington, Ont., near Hamilton, said he hadn’t been to the capital in five years when he got the ticket in October. And he said his 1967 Pontiac Grande Parisienne, the vehicle supposedly ticketed, hadn’t been in Ottawa for several years either, since the previous owner sold it.
“I Googled the address and the letterhead and everything looked legit,” said Craig, a 52-year-old steelworker. “It just seemed really weird.”
But the $110 invoice, for parking on Daly Avenue in a no-stopping zone on a September Saturday, was real.
It was swiftly retracted by city staff, though, after Craig’s wife called to explain the situation.
The case isn’t as unusual as it may seem.
A spreadsheet of voided tickets, released to the Citizen through a freedom-of-information request, shows 1,164 tickets were cancelled up until Nov. 5 this year because the wrong person had been charged or because there were technical errors involving a missing or wrong plate number.
“Any time you’ve got humans involved in anything, you’re going to have human error,” said Coun. Mark Taylor, who chairs Ottawa’s community and protective services committee. The committee oversees bylaw issues.
The data was tallied by the city’s courthouse and provincial offence services branch.
Taylor said the wrong person can be charged if an attendant jots a plate down incorrectly, or a handheld device doesn’t capture a number or letter properly.
Being one character off can send the invoice for the ticket — a financial charge and provincial offence — to the wrong person. Seeing a different plate number, the driver of the vehicle actually ticketed could disregard the slip left on their dash.
Craig said he’s worried others who get wrong tickets will just pay, as he considered, and not call the city out, especially without a vehicle description to verify or contradict the charge.
“How many people will just be so afraid of it,” he said, “that they’ll just pay for it?”
Voided tickets increased during the three years prior, when a full set of data was provided. There were 1,227 in 2010, 1,423 in 2011 and 1,641 in 2012.
“It’s rising, slowly,” Taylor said. “But the total number of tickets that we’re issuing is rising significantly as well.”
More than 370,000 tickets were handed out in 2012, resulting in revenues of about $19 million, which was higher than in the past. The tickets voided that year were only 0.4 per cent of tickets issued.
“The more tickets you issue, the more chance there is there’s going to be an error,” Taylor said.
After a bylaw change in February 2012, private parking-lot attendants started giving out city tickets and sharing revenue.
“There’s obviously a learning curve there,” Taylor said, adding that a “potential downside” would be more voided tickets. But he said the upside is that grievances with privately issued parking tickets are now subject to city-governed remedies.
Although the airport, hospitals, universities, private companies and other issuers are listed in the information released to the Citizen, the city’s own parking control gave out the majority of erroneous tickets. Taylor said that’s because the city gives out the most tickets.
To find out if there are other reasons tickets are being voided, and how much revenue the city is losing as a result, a city spokeswoman said the Citizen would have to file more formal freedom-of-information requests.
Michael Low, founder of Parking Ticket Guys, a company that helps people fight tickets, said the high number of glitches is a result of municipalities handing out more tickets to earn more revenue.
“There’s a push to issue more tickets; they’re in more of a rush,” said Low, who is opening up an office in Ottawa in the new year. “It’s not just an Ottawa phenomenon. It’s global.”
He said attendants should be matching expiry date stickers on the back of vehicles, as well as the plates, to verify they have the right person. Checking with the Ministry of Transportation, he said, it would be obvious if they had the wrong plate because the expiry date wouldn’t match.
“That would really cut down on the errors,” he said. “The terrible thing is the anxiety and the waste of someone’s time fighting this thing. You’ve won the lottery of bad luck.”
Taylor said staff in Ottawa do an assessment of the whole vehicle getting a ticket, including its expiry stickers. He said some tickets may enter the system and be struck out quickly, even before the plate owner complains, if the expiry date doesn’t match the plate.
He noted that most erroneous cases are solved before the wrong person would have to appear in court.
“There are opportunities for our bylaw department to continue to refine the training that they do,” he said, “and they’re always looking at what’s a new technology that we can put into place to help reduce the number of errors and create efficiency.”
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com/
Author: CARYS MILLS
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