‘Out of hand’: Residents on Scarborough street say they’re constantly ticketed, but have nowhere to park

Some residents on a street in Scarborough’s Cliffcrest area aren’t feeling very mellow about yellow these days — specifically the infuriating yellow parking tickets they’re perpetually snatching off their vehicle windshields.

Residents on National Street, not far from St. Clair Avenue East and Midland Avenue, say they’re being incessantly ticketed for parking near their homes, even though there’s no signage saying they can’t, and no permit parking options available.

Felicia, who lives on the street, has received eight tickets in the last nine weeks. She splayed the tickets out to CityNews cameras like a magician with a deck of cards, but can’t seem to make the costly fines vanish.

“It’s getting out of hand, honestly,” she said. “We live on a residential street, it’s not even a through-street, it’s a dead-end street … and there’s no signage or anything to say we can’t park here and we also can’t get parking permits.”

She now resorts to parking at the nearby GO station in an attempt to evade further fines.

According to a city-wide bylaw, if there aren’t any signs indicating parking limits or prohibiting parking, a three-hour parking limit applies.

Felicia, however, says even when she adheres to that limit she’s been getting dinged.

“It was about 3 p.m. I went inside … I cooked some pasta and some ground turkey, and came back out and I had a ticket on my car and that doesn’t even take … an hour to make pasta. So I’m not sure where they are waiting around for us, I really don’t know what’s going on.”

CityNews contacted the Toronto Police Service, which said: “Ticket volumes are influenced by population density, street lay out, parking inventory, permit parking, posted regulations, and levels of non-compliance.”

For residents like Felicia, or Sokol Dodaj, that explanation does little to help.

Dodaj says he’s received almost $2,000 worth of tickets in the last two months.

“I start having tickets almost every night and I even tried to talk to the people and explain to them I am handicapped,” he told CityNews.

“The problem is we don’t have nowhere else to go and park the cars, just here.”

Dodaj and another neighbour recently submitted a petition to their local councillor, Parthi Kandavel, asking for changes to the rules so residents could remain in compliance without the tickets piling up.

Residents say with so few options, they believe their street is wide enough to accommodate on-street permit parking.

CityNews reached out to Coun. Kandavel about the issue, but did not receive a response before publication.

Felicia suggests a compromise, saying residents who live on the street should be allowed to register their licence plates with the parking authority “so they know who actually lives on the street and then they can go ahead and ticket the cars that don’t actually reside here.”