Vancouver, British Columbia — January 29, 2015 — The City of Vancouver is looking to amp up their towing policy by zeroing in on chronic parking offenders, whether they’ve paid up or not.
CBC reports that the city is in early talks of adjusting the current approach — which solely targets vehicles holding three outstanding tickets — to include those of motorists habitually violating parking laws even if they’ve paid all outstanding fines.
Director of city streets, Taryn Scollard, told CBC that the city still needs to determine the number of tickets a driver would need to accumulate before running the risk of having their vehicle towed if caught parked at an expired meter.
“It could be five, it could be seven over two years. We haven’t yet done the analysis on what other municipalities are doing. It’s really at the beginning stages of development,” Scollard said in the report, adding that the driving force behind the proposed change comes down to compliance.
“Parking tickets are never a popular situation, but it helps change the behaviour,” he says.
The number of parking tickets handed out by the city has been decreasing in recent years, coming in at 328,567 in 2014, which is an estimated drop of 3,500 compared to totals in 2013 and a staggering dip of nearly 30,000 in relation to the year before.
