Map of the Week: Parking tickets

PETER POWER/TORONTO STAR

This week's map shows all Toronto addresses where more than 1,000 parking tickets were written in 2008.

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The city's two top addresses for parking tickets last year were Sunnybrook, with 8,875 tickets, or 24 a day, and the Sherway Gardens mall in Etobicoke, (across the street from the Trillium Health Centre) with 7,095 written, or nearly 20 a day. Here are the top 10:

1) 2075 BAYVIEW AVE              8875
Sunnybrook
2) 25 THE WEST MALL               7095
Sherway Gardens mall, across the street from the Trillium Health Centre
3) 1750 FINCH AVE E                5670
Seneca College - Newnham Campus
4) 20 EDWARD ST                  4440
World's Biggest Book Store
5) 60 MURRAY ST                  3041
Near Mount Sinai and Princess Margaret
6) 25 ST MARY ST                2780
Near Yonge and Charles
7) 2401 YONGE ST                2571
Near Yonge and Eglinton
8) 1265 MILITARY TR             2497
U of T Scarborough campus
9) 110 ELM ST                      2307
Hospital for Sick Children
10) 3030 BIRCHMOUNT RD    2269
Scarborough Hospital - Grace Division

The city as a whole had about 2.8 million parking tickets written last year.

Hospitals seem to attract parking violators, or parking enforcement, depending on your point of view. This also applies to hospitals outside the downtown core - Sunnybrook, Toronto Western, the East General and especially St. Joseph's (see below) all have icons. The Distillery District also seems to get a lot of attention, though whether the area has an epidemic of illegal parking or is just a short walk from 51 Division is an open question.

The map below is live - use all the available features, and click on an icon for more information.

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Click to open a map in a new window centred on:

Bloor between Avenue and Yonge
Yonge and Eglinton
Dundas between Yonge and University
Adelaide between Yonge and University
Distillery District
St. Joseph's Hospital

Nerd box:

The map is our first attempt to embed a working map in the blog itself, instead of a separate XML file. Please leave a comment if it doesn't work with your browser or seems unusually slow to load. For users of earlier versions of IE, I'd be curious to know if it it loads faster - this is the hope on this end. The KML used in this map is a recognizable cousin of the XML we've used up until this point, but there are differences. One of the more complicating ones is that our files have used a lat/long convention, while as far as I've been able to tell so far KML works in long/lat. So a lot of our existing resources can't be as easily converted as I had hoped. From experience, the solution will end up being something cludgy involving Word, Excel and Notepad, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Information obtained from the City of Toronto under access-to-information legislation.

Comments

[Robyn]

Re: conversion kludge, I suspect you may wish to look into Excel's pivot tables feature. Useful but wildly nonintuitive.

[casey]

The problem with St. Joseph's is the lack of paid parking spaces. Those spots fill up in no time. All those streets surrounding St. Joe's that have the icons also have an hour of free parking. But who is ever in a hospital for less than an hour?

So the meter maids are really taking advantage at St. Joe's. It really is a despicable job.

By the way, the may showed up fine in my rss reader.

[Steve H.]

This is the coolest, most original blog I have come across in some time. Absolutely excellent!

[Piper]

I know that hospitals have to make money seeing as our government won't cough up enough money to run them properly but it is really disgusting to ticket people who paid for parking but their time has run out. Even the ER at Sunnybrook has metered parking. In many instances you have rushed a loved one to the ER with a serious medical emergency. You throw whatever coins you have in the meter but once in the ER your main focus is the person who is ill. People should be given the opportunity to go to the administration office and pay whatever extra has to be paid after the emergency is over.

[Just a mom]

Shooting Fish In a Barrel - wondering why 1908 parking tickets were issued on Breadalbane, north of College St between Bay & Yonge? It's because this is the street where parents pick up their babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers from the downtown Y Daycare Centre. Most tickets are issued early in the morning at drop off time and in the afternoon, just in time for parents picking up their young ones. Breadalbane is otherwise a quiet unused street. Instead of preventing rush hour traffic jams caused by cars "stopped" in the No-Stopping zones along Yonge street, the quota-driven system targets hard working parents just trying to get their babies home after a long day. Hospitals and Daycares...SHAME!

[Simon Gallimore]

I would imagine most of the tickets were issued by onsite security with ticketing priveleges, rather than by the police or green hornets themselves.

[D]

You are absolutley right! people visiting loved ones in the hospital, why they should be able to park anywhere they want and stay there all day! So what if your kid has to be rushed to the emergency room? You don't need a parking space, just park in the ambulance lane, you are after all transporting someone to the hospital aren't you? And daycare centres? well let's just follow the same practice, so what if some hard working parent has their child run over by another hard working parent who is now late for work because they couldn't find any parking? How about a little bain power people? This promtotes turn over, so that when YOU get there, you can find a spot to do what you have to... it also keeps school and day care areas clear so you don't have to worry about your little one being hit by a car...and it does happen every year, and everyone wonders why!

[Eximius]

The map loads fine on my IE - quick and clear.

Just a thought, could it (the data) be time related -if one area has a predominance of early moring, vs mid vs late morning, etc, etc. tickets?

[Medical researcher]

I work at 60 Murray Street (3041 parking tickets), and it was only within the past couple of years that we actually had a postal code. Previous to that, we and could not receive mail directly addressed to us. It is mind boggling that the people handing out parking tickets had no problem finding us when Canada Post did not even know of our existance! P.S. I think parking tickets are a wonderful thing, I take the TTC.

[TSharpe]

I am a member of a volunteer organization that meets occasionally at the U of T Scarborough campus. Last January 27 I parked and put my credit card into the ticket machine only to have it spit back out with a message telling me that I was parking outside of the paying period - no payment required. The time was 4:00 pm but the sign indicated that I had to pay until 5:00. I put my card in again but the machine did not want to argue - I looked around for an attendant, none were in sight. I attended my meeting and returned to find yellow tickets flapping from a number of windshields, mine included.

I am quite sure that there in no conspiracy here but I am equally sure that there a few parking enforcement officers aware of the problem with the ticket machines and they are making their quotas with little effort.

Fix the ticket machines and Military Trail will soon work its way off the Top Ten List.

[Electric Landlady]

I wonder how many of those Elm and Edward St. tickets are intercity buses that can't get into the bus terminal? I work at Dundas and Chestnut, and it seems like there are always a few Greyhound (etc.) buses hanging around with tickets on their windshields.

[Electric Landlady]

Another thought... even assuming a constant number of parking violations per metre of street, larger buildings (like, say, hospitals) are going to have proportionally more tickets. That could also explain part of the Distillery District's numbers -- they don't actually seem to have that many street addresses there, compared to the number of parking spaces.

[Peggy F.]

This is a fabulous blog! I love the visuals and the thoughtful commentary.

Hospitals seem to be a magnet for parking problems - not enough spaces and not set up in a practical way for people to park for the length of time they need. It's stressful just getting into the building. I wonder if that's factored into the blood pressure readings of people in emerg.

[Leanne Kroll]

I am a Technical Illustrator and I found the information you compiled interesting from a visual standpoint. I have created a different version of your map as an Information Graphic, mainly focusing on the downtown core area where parking tickets were issued.

Check out my version of your map of the week at www.leannekroll.wordpress.com/ I also have additional information as to my thoughts on the visuals of this project.

Great work on research and information gathering! You might want to check out www.zoomify.com, a free software for zooming that you may find useful in the future.

[Kathleen]

Mine was one of the 1,090 tickets issued right in front of the Old Spaghetti Factory on the Esplanade, likely all for a single one-car space. I can tell you why it's a hot spot: There's a fire hydrant more than 10 feet away from the curb, hidden by various posts and boxes etc. On the night I got my ticket, there was heavy snow obscuring everything. As an urban driver/parker, I know to look for hydrants at the curbside, however I didn't expect to find it so far afield. Took my friend and me nearly a minute to find it that night after reading the ticket infraction note. I feel like it's entrapment, and on a recent trip saw a parking officer stop down the block, then walk up the street to the spot and pull out his pad. Shooting fish in a barrel indeed. The spot should be clearly marked, if protecting the public safety truly is the intent. I wouldn't have parked there had I seen the hydrant.

[Charles Blahnik]

I got one near st. Joseph hospital. 1 hour parking allowed from 10 AM to 6 PM. I understand the reason - the local residents with parking permits need to find a place to park. It was approximately 10 AM when I parked. I got a ticket for parking at 9:47 AM. What happened to common sense? To me this case confirms that this is a cash grab that has nothing to do with protecting local residents, promoting trafic, etc. I believe that parking officers have some financial incentive related to the number of tickets they issue, which overrides the common sence and constitutes a conflict of interest. If this is true, the tickets will be issued where is it easiest for the parking officer to collect his/her bonus rather than in places where real problems are.