Have you been issued a $30.00 Toronto parking ticket and requested a court date in order to contest? If so, chances are that you never heard back from Toronto court services with a date and you feel like you’ve won the lottery. In fact this is not a random isolated incident and you are not alone.

According to Toronto court services:
• since January 2006 it accepted 250,000 requests from drivers to contest a $30.00 parking ticket
• to date only 4,300 trial dates were issued
• since January 2008 it has accepted 37,000 requests from drivers to contest a $30.00 parking ticket
• to date 0 trial dates have been issued
• 600,000 charges are heard annually in the city courts that include everything from municipal bylaw infractions, workplace safety violations, and speeding tickets
• there are a shortage of courtrooms
• there are a shortage of justices of the peace who preside over the parking ticket trials

A $30.00 Toronto parking ticket is usually issued for overtime parking and in the grand scheme of things it is a very low priority in terms of scheduling trial dates. Parking tickets are very lucrative for the city of Toronto. Last year alone the city collected $79 million from parking tickets. From purely a dollar and cents perspective it has been suggested that would cost the city more money to issue the trial dates and proceed with each one than to stop holding trials for $30.00 parking tickets. Chances are that if you are issued a $30.00 Toronto parking tickets and you request a trail date, you will never have to pay the ticket. However that is not a certainty and your requests will remain in the system and could come back to haunt you at a later date. Are you waiting for a trail date for your $30.00 parking ticket? Did you know that you had a good chance of not having to pay before you requested your trial date?