Visitors to Calgary owe millions in unpaid parking tickets

Visitors owe millions Unpaid parking tickets by out of province visitors add up to millions that can’t be recovered. Alesia Fieldberg has details.

The City of Calgary is out more than $2 million in unpaid parking fines on vehicles from out of province because it can’t collect under current rules.

That figure is from thousands of unpaid fines over the last four years.

“Roughly four percent of the tags we issue on a yearly basis go unpaid, that’s for a whole variety of reasons, whether they are from out of province or people forget about them,” said Mike Derbyshire, Calgary Parking Authority.

An unpaid ticket will eventually catch up to you if your vehicle is registered in this province. In Alberta, tickets are linked to licenses and plates, so when a driver goes to renew either, they are blocked from doing so until they pay up. Some visitors to our province do pay their fines, but for those who don’t, there is no consequence. Those unpaid tickets add up to about a half a million dollars per year, money that could be used for road maintenance and public spaces.

While the losses are only about two percent of the Calgary Parking Authority’s revenue, it is looking at ways to deal with the issue.

“We would work together with partners in Edmonton and other cities in Alberta to encourage Alberta Transportation to work on interprovincial relationships that we need,” said Derbyshire. ”It would be like maintenance enforcement, there are some of those agreements in place between provinces, traffic tickets aren’t one of them at this point.”

The Calgary Parking Authority gives about 290,000 tickets per year generating about $13 million which goes back to the city.