Ottawa is now giving out yellow parking tickets. That doesn't fix our parking crunch | Opinion

Parking tickets are now yellow instead of white, with additional days to make payment. Photo by Tony Caldwell /Postmedia

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After New Ways to Bus, which included lingering downtown after work (so as to spread out rush hour because our transit isn’t ready to handle return-to-office volumes), we are moving on to New Ways to Park Illegally, because there aren’t enough spaces downtown. Is the city deliberately trying to set itself up for failure come September? It sure looks like it.

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Consider the changes to the way it hands out parking tickets. As of July 28, the tickets are printed on a vibrant shade of yellow instead of the boring old white. This, we are told, will make them easier to spot on your windshield.

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River ward Coun. Riley Brockington, who chairs the emergency preparedness and protective services committee, said the colour responds to “legitimate concerns about tickets that were left on the windshield that maybe blew off or were taken.” Which is a real thing that happens, and which a brighter colour does precisely nothing to prevent. A yellow ticket blows off a windshield exactly as well as a white one.

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The city is also giving us more time. More time to pay: the early-payment discount window goes from seven days to 15. More time before the late fee: 30 days becomes 45. More time before a ticket lands in default and the city can block your plate renewal: 61 days becomes 76. And more time to challenge a ticket if you’re claiming special circumstances: up to 45 days, instead of the standard 15.

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If you’re wondering why we’re suddenly concerned with parking fines, you’re not alone. Is there a scofflaw streak among Ottawa’s office workers that nobody told me about? Do public servants nurse a secret thrill from stiffing the meter? Or, and I realize I can be slow about these things, is it because the city knows there are not enough legal spaces to put all these cars, and it has decided to manage the resulting flood of fines rather than prevent it?

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Here’s the situation the yellow ticket is papering over. We are forcing people back downtown, four days a week now, and we have not kept pace on parking. Yes, there are lots and garages. Most of the spaces in them are spoken for by monthly pass holders, and a monthly pass is around $200, if not more.

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Beyond the garages, most of the available spaces downtown are full by 7 a.m., so you’re left with on-street paid parking. Which would be fine if you could feed the meter from your desk. Across most of downtown, you can’t; you have to physically move your car to a new spot every hour, sometimes every two.

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Leave aside, if you can, what it does to your productivity to interrupt your work every 60 minutes to go relocate a vehicle. The predictable result is expired meters, because people forget or get delayed, and by the time they get back to the car it has a vibrant yellow rectangle under the wiper.

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We have been talking about return-to-office for years. It is the single most predictable event on the municipal horizon. And somehow we were caught unprepared.

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The city didn’t plan for the parking. It planned for the fines. If city hall had set out, deliberately, to fail at return-to-office, it is genuinely hard to see what it would have done differently.

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Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer

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