This data scientist mapped every parking ticket issued in Toronto over the past 16 years
It’s fun to see how many millions your street has racked up
If you’re nosy and nerdy and invested in Toronto parking drama, have we got a website for you.
A 27-year-old data scientist and software engineer named Mohammad Abdulhussain recently published a fascinating passion project mapping approximately 37 million parking tickets given to drivers around Toronto between 2008 and 2024.
Related: The Toronto Parking Authority is in hot water again
The map, created using open data published by the city, also includes red-light camera and speed camera tickets, which Abdulhussain tallied up separately. The North York intersection of Bayview Avenue and Truman/Fifeshire Roads saw the most red-light tickets, with 33,981 totalling $11,043,825. The map’s top speed camera site, meanwhile, is on Parkside Drive, with 68,860 tickets totalling $3,443,000.
Understandably, Yonge Street generated the most parking-ticket revenue, with 1,040,706 tickets totalling $54,661,460 over the past 16 years, followed by Queen West, with 701,933 tickets totalling $38,464,865. A much-abused spot on the Mink Mile, 60 Bloor Street West, was the highest individual address on the map, with 766,987 tickets totalling $35,144,675.
The Church-Yonge area has the most tickets overall, but parking enforcement hasn’t forgotten about those outside the city centre: Parkdale and the Danforth also made the top 10.
Users can check out which neighbourhoods and streets accumulated the most tickets, how much revenue is generated by area and year, and how parking patterns fluctuate over time.
Rather impressively, it took Abdulhussain only about a week to put the project together. He says he stayed up until 3 a.m. working on it in between applying for jobs. “I wanted to try to get this done as soon as possible so I could expand it to the rest of the GTA,” he says.
Abdulhussain says the growing controversy around speed cameras gave him the idea—and his belief in the public’s right to transparency.
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.
