Private parking lots and their parking machines are not covered under any bylaws across any of Canada’s biggest cities, and it is creating problems nobody would have imagined could occur, such as the printing of parking passes that short people on time and result in people receiving wrongfully issued parking tickets. Despite that cities have their own internal policies related to the maintenance of parking machines and parking meters, no efforts have been made by any city to ensure that parking machines on private parking lots get maintained and function properly.
When a city-run parking machine or parking meter is identified as being faulty, that machine is shut down and quarantined until it can be dealt with. However, what happens when people who pay for parking at a private parking lot fail to realize that they are being shorted for a handful of minutes from the time they paid for? Because how many people make sure to verify that when they pay to park at private parking that the parking machine is printing a parking pass for the correct amount of time?
The lack of bylaws to account for the necessary maintenance of parking machines found on private parking lots can open a can of worms that no city will want to address because of how far-reaching the implications may end up being. But given what is at stake, they may have to. A city probably has no way to address people who have been wrongfully issued parking tickets from faulty parking machines, never mind deal with those wrongfully issued tickets that have already been paid for. It is practically impossible to go back and cross-reference the parking machines at these private parking lots for time stamp errors, but the discrepancies may have been occurring since parking machines were first introduced.
A Faulty Parking Machine Identified
In July I ended up driving my father to see our family doctor for some health check-ups, and I made a discovery while paying for parking at the medical building’s private parking lot. Their Indigo parking machine had shorted me 4-minutes on a 30-minute parking pass. After taking down the machine’s identifying information and reaching out to the Indigo office in Ottawa and leaving a detailed voice message – no response. About one week later, at the same location, the Indigo parking machine shorted me 6-minutes on a 1-hour parking pass. Despite that I called and left another voice message, I never heard back from the Indigo office in Ottawa.
There were a few more instances over the next few weeks where I would go and pay for a parking pass, and the machine continued to short me and others. That Indigo parking machine was still printing parking passes that were shorting people on time – more than one month after I had notified Indigo of the issue. The lack of respect demonstrated by Indigo Canada’s office in Ottawa was not exclusive to me, because they gave the same treatment to the two City Councillors that I had connected with to get the issue resolved. There was a total disregard for the authority of the City of Ottawa, Ottawa’s Mayor, and the other officials responsible for ensuring that Ottawa lived up to its world-class potential.
What further complicates this issue of faulty parking machines is that it was not my first time picking up on it. One year earlier, I parked at a private parking lot in Ottawa’s downtown area and noticed that I had been shorted 5-minutes of parking after I had paid for 2-hours of parking. On that occasion, I spoke with someone who was inside a “mini office” on the premise of the private parking lot, and they thanked me for making them aware of the issue, and that I could stay past the amount of parking I paid for, and they would make sure that I was not issued a parking ticket. Perhaps the prevalence of faulty parking machines at private parking lots that were printing parking passes that shorted people on time has been far greater than we can even begin to account for.
The Missing Regulation
After reaching out to Canada’s biggest cities and their by-law services, all of them confirmed that they did not have any bylaws that addressed how private parking lots operated, outside of them requiring business licences. Some of the municipal representatives even thanked me for the heads up, and that they would personally be double-checking their parking passes from now on and telling their friends to do so too. It was on no one’s radar, and one city official acknowledge that operating on the “trust model” may not have been the best idea.
As for the City of Ottawa’s response to the private parking lot’s faulty Indigo parking machine issue, it was recommended that I raise the issue with the Ottawa Police Services (OPS) and community resource officers. However, the issue with getting the OPS to investigate the matter is that our city’s police service was already stretched thin, there was no identifiable financial harm that was committed, and they did not have unfettered access to all the required information in the way that Ottawa By-law and Regulatory Services (OBRS) would. The OPS would end up confirming that they were not the best stakeholder to act on the issue, and I was connected with an OBRS supervisor who has managed to connect with the Indigo office in Ottawa.
During our chat, one of the challenges that arose was that the fact that this was a private business and that there was a total absence of any bylaws related to the issue. There would be no way to go back and cross-reference the database of information related to the faulty Indigo parking machine with the parking tickets that were issued. For that reason, this situation serves as an example of why it is bad thinking to have an overreliance on machines and to believe that people are prone to making errors. Not just from the perspective of a policy writer, but also from the perspective of a consumer.