2010 in Toronto parking tickets

The corpus holds 2,760,045 parking tickets for 2010, and their set fines add up to $111,518,215. That is 0.5% below the 2,774,553 tickets recorded for 2009, so activity barely changed from one year to the next. The City publishes complete records only, so these totals can differ a little from the number of tickets actually written.

Tickets in 2010 came in two waves. The busiest hours were around midday: the hours from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. made up 21.9% of tickets with a valid time, with the peak in the noon hour at 209,974 tickets. A second, overnight wave from midnight to 5 a.m. made up 19.2%, mostly tied to permit-parking rules. Early morning, from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m., was the quietest stretch. These patterns show when enforcement happened, not when people parked, and enforcement is not spread evenly across the day.

By family, no parking during signed hours led with 24.9% of tickets, followed by unpaid meters and pay-and-display at 21.4% and permit parking at 17.1%. Private property made up 12.7% and no stopping or rush-hour rules 11.8%. Hydrant, fire-route, accessible-space, sidewalk and bike-lane infractions were 4.4%. The single most common code was code 5, parking on a highway at a prohibited time or day, with 573,781 tickets (20.8%). Next came code 29, parking at a prohibited time without a permit (463,321), and code 3, parking on private property (343,001).

Among streets, Yonge Street had the most tickets matched to its segments at about 70,048. Danforth Avenue followed at 60,857.5 and Bloor Street West at 60,565, then Queen Street West and Queen Street East. Busy commercial main streets lead partly because they are long and heavily patrolled. Enforcement is not spread evenly across the city.