What if I told you that you could have your pick of the most convenient street parking spaces in any city? What if I told you I could virtually guarantee you an empty spot on busy downtown streets at almost any time of day? What if I told you that it would cost, on average, $125 a month?
You’d say I was higher than a Georgia pine.
But you’d be wrong.
Welcome to the world of gas-powered vehicles parking illegally in spots designated for electric cars. Yes, that’s the latest depressing wrinkle in the never-ending battle royale we call parking. It was only a matter of time before the thousands of lost souls searching endlessly realized that the empty EV charging stations are combustion-engine accessible for those who are morally flexible. The temptation is great.
What’s at stake? A primo EV parking spot. As Globe columnist David Berman recently observed, “many public charging locations, which are reserved for EVs that need a boost, can provide a convenient pit stop in busy areas.”
What’s at risk for those parking in them illegally? In most of Ontario, a $125 parking ticket. In Toronto, parking a non-electric vehicle in a designated electric vehicle parking space is only a $75 fine.
If you get caught. And it isn’t always in a cities’ best interest to catch a lot of people violating this rule.
It’s not surprising that law-breaking gas-powered vehicle drivers are beginning to make use of them. How do I know? Well, I’ve done it. I’ve swooped into an EV-only charging station street spot, parked my gas-powered car and dashed to and from the ATM, a quick move that allowed me to dodo bird my car in a spot reserved for the EV brigade. Since that initial transgression, I’ve left my car in an EV space twice more, a little longer each time. It was all part of my investigative research. I have now vowed to leave these EV spots to their rightful users.
I was curious to see if I’d get caught. I was ticket-free. I don’t appear to be alone. I have studied EV charging station occupancy on busy streets and noticed a slow increase of gas-powered cars in them.
Drivers ignore parking rules. Why would they draw the line at electric vehicle charging stations? Drivers double park and triple park. They park where it’s prohibited, they park when it’s prohibited. They park on people’s lawns, sidewalks and bike lanes. They clog streets. Drivers illegally park because they hardly ever get caught. Parking authorities do what they can, but there is no way to keep up with the tsunami of illegal parking that occurs in every city every day.
That’s because the system is rigged in the violator’s favour. Parking fines are revenue for cities. However, vigilant enforcement costs money and actually reduces revenues.
“The Causes and Consequences of Curb Parking Management” was published in 2021 in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice. Its authors, University of California, Los Angeles researchers professor Michael Manville and then-PhD candidate Miriam Pinski, articulated the parking fine conundrum.
“Fines can only raise substantial revenue if some combination of two conditions are met,” they wrote. “First, violations must be widespread. When violations are rare, the city has nothing to tax. The base is narrow. Second, enforcement must be relatively ineffective: most violations must not be punished. That condition might be surprising, but consider what happens when rulebreaking results in immediate and inevitable punishment. Although revenue will at first rise (all violators are caught), it will soon fall (when people expect to be caught, they stop violating). Effective enforcement drives violations, and thus violation revenue, toward zero. Optimal parking enforcement, in fact, if enforcement is designed to deter violation, raises no revenue at all. It will cost money. Parking enforcement designed to maximize revenue, in contrast, must be mediocre and uneven – vigorous enough to catch some violators, but not vigorous enough to deter violation.”
So, a $75 fine for parking in a spot reserved for EVs isn’t much of a deterrence.
Nor will the much-lauded higher fines for other offences. In August, the City of Toronto announced that it was increasing parking fines for 123 offences, declaring “Increasing fines can help reduce congestion by discouraging drivers from parking and stopping their vehicles in high-traffic areas and encouraging people to consider other modes of transportation such as walking, cycling or public transit to promote a smoother flow of traffic.”
At the time, I contacted the city and asked if this assertion – that “increasing fines can help reduce congestion” – was based on any scientific or academic studies, if the city had based their decision on any real evidence, statistical or otherwise.
It had not.
City of Toronto spokesperson Lilian Kim says the city will “use the number of fines issued and subsequent reduction in the number fines issued as the proxy to determine if the new fine amounts are having an impact on reducing congestion.”
Let’s hope they do.
By my calculations, a driver could park illegally in spots designated for electric cars for a month and get one, maybe two parking tickets. Given the cost of parking downtown in a city like Toronto, that’s almost breaking even. That’s why more and more gas-powered cars will park illegally in EV stations (and everywhere else). They don’t think they’ll get caught and if they do, the cost isn’t that much higher than if they always paid for parking.
Ultimately, like many traffic infractions, technology may provide the answer. For example, “smart” charging stations could identify non-electric interlopers and ticket them. EV-spots could have cameras that photograph occupants and tickets could be issued after any infractions, the way cameras and radar are used to catch speeders.
It’s true what they say, those EV vehicles sure do come with a lot of perks. As tempted as you might be fellow gas-powered drivers, let’s leave them for people driving EVs.