Can I really get out of a parking ticket by applying for a court date?

With our city short on courtrooms and judges, $30 parking tickets aren’t exactly a priority, so, yes, fighting a ticket will probably make it go away. Of the 198,165 Toronto drivers who appealed tickets in 2008, only 10 per cent were issued a trial date. The requests are on the books as “scheduled for court,” but chances are, they will remain in parking ticket purgatory forever. In the past, paying up has been easier than going through the administrative rigmarole of filing for a court date, but the recent launch of parkingtickets.to may change that. The Web site allows you to register your infraction information on-line and pay $10 to have the site’s creator, Greg Kasparian Jr., schlep down to Metro Hall and file your dispute by proxy.

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