Drivers who block Toronto’s designated snow routes will now be fined $500
Think about that before you delay a streetcar this winter
After several major snowstorms last February, for which the city was spectacularly unprepared, it took weeks for crews to get rid of nearly 50 centimetres of snow.
Partly due to the city’s snow services contract, signed by former mayor John Tory, which does not contain provisions for snow removal (only plowing), large snowbanks were left on the sides of main streets, causing parked vehicles to get in the way of streetcar routes. Two weeks after the first major snowfall, a TTC spokesperson told Toronto Today that they’d received 1,000 reports of parked cars blocking TTC tracks, causing delays of a few minutes up to more than an hour and a half.
“We’ll add in snow removal so that the contract actually works,” Mayor Olivia Chow told CBC this week, referring to eventual revisions she’d like to suggest for 2029 when the contract expires. “Can you imagine signing a contract and forgetting to add in snow removal?”
We cannot, and until then, we’re nervous about how this winter’s going to go. But city council took a proactively punitive step yesterday, voting to raise the fine for parking illegally in designated snow routes. The previously $200 ticket was determined to not be a deterrent, and has been increased to $500.
“We saw this over and over again in February where people were just leaving their vehicle and bringing the entire transit line to a halt,” said Councillor Dianne Saxe, who moved the motion. “When you block a streetcar you not only block the 100 people on that streetcar, you also block the thousands of people—anyone else—on that streetcar line,” she continued, as reported by the Toronto Star.
If $500 still isn’t enough to make drivers think twice about where they park, just light a cigarette and push their car out of the way with a few fellow transit-riders.
Related: John Tory may run for mayor again. The question on everyone’s minds: Why?
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
