Entering incorrect licence plate number could mean parking ticket
Annette Galbraith was puzzled five months ago when she returned to the vehicle she parked on 20th Street to find a ticket.
“I was like, ‘Why did I get a ticket?’ ” the Saskatoon care home worker said in an interview on Friday. “I put enough money in. I was shocked.”
Galbraith called the city and found out she had entered the wrong licence plate number.
She and her daughter had registered their vehicles on the same day and received sequential licence plates with only one different digit. She had entered the plate number for the wrong vehicle.
Galbraith said the person she contacted at city hall told her the ticket would be cancelled, but only the one time.
“I was really nice on the phone and they were really nice back,” she said.
Others tell a different tale, according to responses to a social media request on Friday asking for people’s experiences. Some people received communication from the city indicating there was no flexibility. Others have gone to court to fight the tickets.
“Precise entry of licence plate info is required for a successful parking transaction,” the City of Saskatoon’s general manager of community services, Randy Grauer, said in an emailed statement.
“We have always applied some form of administrative discretion to our parking tickets, and we will continue to do so in the future.”
The city replaced meters with parking stations in business districts in 2015. Now payment is not linked to a particular stall, but to a vehicle’s licence plate.
Vehicles can move from stall to stall and even to other districts, but you have to key in your licence plate correctly. Otherwise, the city ’s parking enforcement vehicles, which scan licence plates, will determine you have not paid and issue a ticket.
Coun. Zach Jeffries asked the administration in September to study the possibility of a review process for people who have entered their licence plates incorrectly.
The response to his request was considered at Monday ’s transportation committee meeting, but it was kept confidential under provincial legislation that protects information about law enforcement and investigation.
The committee endorsed the idea of a public education campaign about the need to enter licence plate information correctly. City council still needs to approve that effort.
In an interview on Friday, Jeffries said people may want to consider using the WayToPark app to pay for parking. However, he said he has not given up on some sort of review system so people would not be required to go to court over a “genuine honest mistake.”
Grauer said the city processes about 10,000 parking transactions a day and gets “very, very few complaints.” The app now accounts for 25 per cent of parking transactions, he added.