Today, I witnessed the unimaginable!
 

Was biking to work this morning in Downtown Toronto and witnessed parking enforcement officers confronting the FedEx truck parked in the westbound College bike lane! :thumb:

Great to see the bylaw being enforced. That's it!

Hooray for the Good Guys!

It would have been nice to see a Youtube of it.

All the delivery services seem to think they're above the law. The first time I flew into Louisville, I was amazed the UPS hadn't left all their planes double-parked on the runway with the four-ways on.

:roflmao2:

I read an article one time about how it is cheaper for UPS (& I'm assuming their competitors) to just pay the parking tickets than it is to try to find a legal place to park and carry all of the boxes wherever they needed to go (in larger cities). I'd imagine that the cities like this little revenue source & so they go pretty easy on the trucks, ticketing them but not really discouraging the behaviour. It was pretty eye-popping how much UPS paid NYC every year in fines.

We had an incident in Raleigh in which a UPS truck was ticketed and booted for double-parking on a street while making a delivery. In this case, the driver had nowhere else to park due to poor planning on the city's park (no delivery zone on a street lined with businesses). It caused quite an uproar in the local news, and I think the city ended up forgiving the fine.

On the other hand, my new commute route has bike lanes along several stretches of road (for the first time in my commuting experience). However, the bike lanes are essentially useless for cyclists. People who live along those streets seem to view the bike lanes as parking lanes, and they are filled with cars. And in most places, the lanes are filled with sticks, pine straw and broken glass as apparently the street sweepers don't get by there very often. I continue riding in the road like I always do.

They didn't *that day*. :)

They do fly over my house in a steady stream about midnight every night though. :notamused:

I seriously considered flipping out my camera phone, but then thought better of it as I'm sure the parking enforcement officers don't want to be videotaped while performing their jobs (don't want this to be the last bike-lane-blocker the officer goes after), and also because I'd have looked like a pretty big dork and didn't want to interrupt my commute.

But, yes, it would have been nice to immortalize the rare event.

I doubt that those courier services think they are above the law rather than just consider the citations a cost of doing business. I've seen those vehicles with multiple citations under the wiper of several vehicles and the drivers don't seem to care.

Too bad that the cost of tickets are not a good deterrent. Seems like it would be simple to come up with a better by-law by increasing the amount ticketed for each subsequent infraction. Eventually this behavior would no longer be profitable for couriers.

I wonder if city councils have thought about this, and overlook it for economic reasons (increased courier costs would trickle down to consumers), or if we just need better cycling advocacy about these laws (however, I know there are tons of passionate advocates in big cities, so what gives!)? I mean, who would vote against a sliding-scale ticketing law where you get off with a slap on the wrist the first time, but are seriously fined if you're a repeat offender?