There’s two sides to every parking ticket from private lots.
On the one hand, there’s the law. On the other is the reality the private companies can’t actually make you pay.
“You should pay them, because you shouldn’t steal,” Kyla Lee, a lawyer with Acumen Law Corporation in Vancouver told iNFOnews.ca.
“For private parking lot tickets, there isn’t technically a legal obligation to pay them in the sense that there’s not a mechanism in law for them to really enforce the tickets.”
That doesn’t mean the parking lot operators aren’t going to make the lives of offenders miserable. It’s just that, in the end, they are unlikely to ever collect from an unwilling customer.
“If they wanted to invest the money, they could make an arguable case that you have entered into a contract by parking on their lot,” Lee said. “You’ve taken the service that they’re offering – parking – and you have to compensate them for that.
“The thing is, they don’t usually have proof of who parked so you don’t have proof of who is entering into the contract and you don’t necessarily have proof there was acquiescence. Because somebody did something doesn’t necessarily mean they were acquiescent to the contract even though the sign might say you are.”
The next step is for the parking company to send the ticket to a collection agency.
“They bulk it all together and they sell, say, $10,000 worth of parking debt to some company that’s just going to call you and harass you but they can’t actually do anything with it,” Lee said. “If you don’t mind getting a bunch of annoying phone calls and, potentially, being told you can’t park on their property again, you can just not pay it.”
Read the full story here.