Whitby Shores Community Forums

On my doorstep this morning was an "Important Parking Notice - For Members of Tallships Drive". Anyone else get this notice?

I thought this was the perfect opportunity to start the parking on street debate. I for one feel that laws are in place for a reason. Therefore, I agree that if you park on the street for more then 3hrs, you deserve a ticket.

Tallships looks like the GO Train lot on some days (and I am not talking about weekends when guests are over). There are neighbors who have made the street their permanent parking spot. They deserve to be ticketed.

Next...

It was pretty funny. I laughed the hardest when I read that he/she goes out and moves the car a foot at a time when his/her wheels get chalked (3hr limit). People do crazy things!

The last time I looked, we do not own the piece of road in front of our houses. Therefore, we have no right to complain when someone chooses to legally park in front of our house.

That's one of the reasons why I like the 3 hour rule -- it theoretically prevents anyone from making the spot in front of your or anyone else's house their own personal driveway.

As for the person whose car leaks oil onto the roadway, I expect that with a little push the Town could be convinced to add to the ticket, and cite the person for some form of littering, or something. After all, the same way that no individual wants oil on their driveway, the Town also has no desire for the negative affects of an oil leak.

I have gotten a good laugh at these posts -- I can't believe that someone would have the self-centred gall to park their car so to block someone else's driveway under any circumstances, and if someone is so anal as pay enough attention to know when they have to move their car a foot because their tire has been chalked, I have to wonder what other complete trivialities they also pay attention to.

In summary, streets are for driving on, and they are not anyone's personal driveway. We all have the need to use it occasionally (for ourselves or for our guests), and that is why the three hour rule exists instead of an outright ban. Why can't we manage to work within the rules????

I just read the letter and it just cracks me up. The best part is how she writes "however I will not mention who they are  as I am not as petty as they are and do not wish to cause problems." Do not wish to cause problems?! She's passed a letter along to every house on this street. What do you think this person is going to do/say to the first person that confronts them about the only car parked on the street that is leaking oil and has probably been ticketed a handfull of times and now there is a letter circulating around the neighbourhood about them. Yes ,the street parking on Tallships dr. is way out of hand....maybe the town should start towing.

I've PM'd you

I don't think it'd be as much of a cash grab as you make it sound.

Assuming that it's overnight parking that's the biggest issue, the enforcement officer would have to come out once, chalk tires, then come back again more than three hours later to issue tickets.  It's a fairly long, labour-intensive process.  I'm not sure how many tickets could be issued in an hour, but an average of two per hour (i.e. 16 for an 8-hour shift) in residential subdivisions on an ongoing basis sounds ambitious.

And you don't just have to pay for salary.  You also have to pay for benefits and overhead (when you hire enforcement officers, you create more work and more need for staff in the payroll & HR departments, which creates more work for IT and management, which creates demands for things like more office space), and the cost of the vehicle that the officer drives around.

On top of this are the cost of ensuring the tickets get paid after they're issued, the cost of court appearances for officers when tickets are plead "not guilty", and the fact that some tickets will get "not guilty" verdicts.

And if this were actually effective at reducing illegal parking, the revenue source would dry up quickly, while the enforcement costs would stay roughly the same.

Besides the fact that, IMO, it'd be cost-prohibitive to patrol the entire town for 3-hour parking bylaw infractions, I think making enforcement complaint-based is an attempt to strike a balance: temporary on-street parking is a convenience for residents, their guests and other road users; when people use the street as their permanent parking space, it deprives the neighborhood of this convenience.  Each person is their own best judge of what's convenient and inconvenient to them, so only enforcing when there are complaints means that the enforcement only occurs when you are actually inconvenienced, not when the Town thinks you might be.  It prevents the wasting of resources on what's essentially a non-problem.

Effectively, the Town responds to the concern and inconvenience of its residents regarding on-street parking generally, but with the 3-hour by-law, it provides a standard for which the inconvenience is (or should be) minor enough that you're expected to be able to live with it.

Two comments from me:

1. I'd like to see a combination of complaint based and proactive approaches. If the process was initiated by complaint, and then followed up on a regular basis if the enforcement officer identified an area as potentially problematic, the recurring visits would undoubtedly serve to become a deterrent from future parking on a particular street.

2. I think that enforcement officers should be working overnight shifts. Too often I've heard the complaint that bylaw enforcement works during the day only, while it's my humble opinion that the majoirty of bylaw infractions occur during the evening and night when everyone is home. I also don't see how writing more than two tickets per hour could be overly challenging -- spend the first 4 hours of any shift chalking tires, and then the last four retracing your steps and ticketing the remaining offenders. This would catch all of them, but would catch the chronic offenders.

This quote says it best. Street parking is a convenience. How often do guests need to scramble for a parking spot due to neighbors permanently claiming a spot on the street? Tallships is notorious for this.

For those of you who didn't get one and are wondering what we're going on about, here's a quick and dirty scan of the letter as a PDF file.

I've had my driveway blocked many times in the past.  It looks like there's parking in front of my lawn, but the space is just long enough for a mid-size sedan and if anyone actually followed the 2M from a driveway rule, I'm not sure if there would even be space for a SMART car.  I've had people park there overnight on Tuesday morning and the garbage crew didn't even bother to pick up my trash and recycling - either they didn't see it or the parked car was too close.  Many times parked cars on both sides of the street have made it impossible for me to back my car out directly onto the street - I would have to back straight out across the street onto the driveway across from me, and then pull into traffic.

It's an ongoing safety problem because all of these parked cars reduce visibility for drivers entering the flow of traffic, and parking on both sides restricts the flow of traffic.  When we called to complain about parking on Tallships a few months ago by-law enforcement told us that they got way more complaints about parking on Tallships than any other street.  

For a while now I don't drive over 40 in the subdivision period, and 30 down Tallships. I don't need to go faster, but plenty of people behind me seem to NEED too.  One of my guilty pleasures is watching them sweat in my rear view mirror... Where I lived in Scarborough for years, every residential street was signed with 40km/h limits. Seems reasonable to me.

even after the letter went to everyone, it's still a zoo on Tallships...it's like nobody gives a rats !@#! That's amazing