2009 in Toronto parking tickets

The corpus holds 2,774,553 parking tickets for 2009, carrying $113,314,385 in set fines. That is 3.3% below the 2,868,448 tickets recorded for 2008. The City publishes complete records only, so tickets with incomplete records are left out of both years. Ticket counts show enforcement activity, not how often people park or break the rules.

Ticketing was busiest around midday. The single busiest hour was noon to 1 p.m., with 207,001 tickets. A second, overnight peak ran from midnight to about 4 a.m., when 145,315 tickets were written in the midnight hour alone. Activity was lowest from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m.

No parking during signed hours was the largest family, at 24.7% of tickets. It was followed by unpaid meter and pay-and-display tickets (21.5%), permit parking (16.6%) and private property (13.1%). Hydrant, fire-route, accessible-space, sidewalk and bike-lane infractions made up 4.7%. The most common single code was 5, parking on a highway at a prohibited time or day, with 575,044 tickets (20.7%). Next came code 29, parking at a prohibited time without a permit (453,272), and code 3, parking or leaving a vehicle on private property (354,649).

Of the streets matched to the centreline, Bloor St W drew the most tickets, about 74,433. Yonge St followed with 68,323 and Danforth Ave with 63,442. These are long, busy commercial streets, and enforcement is not spread evenly across the city, so these totals reflect where tickets were written as much as how people parked.