Oakville Fire Lane Tickets

Posted by on February 25, 2012

$100 Cost to Visit Friends in Oakville

The saga continues with buck-passing going on between the Towne of Oakville and developers.  The $100 “bear trap” fire lane tickets in some condo complexes are just what the town needs to increase revenue.  With no street lights installed because of poor planning,  not enough signage so that unsuspecting visitors get stung for the $100 surprise and nobody to take responsibility, visitors and residents in Oakville will just keep taking the fall for what really comes back to poor infrastructure management with no incentive for anyone to change it.

Oakville Parking Fire Lane - What Sign?

Parking enforcement officials in the Towne of Oakville building on Trafalgar road maintain:  ” It is the homeowners reponsiblity to tell visitors not to park anywhere near their home”.  In reality, at night, these streets are dark as the new development is occupied but nobody got around to installing street lights – if they are planning to do that at all.  There is only 1 parking spot per condo dedicated to the homeowner, so that leaves visitors fending for themselves on the neighborhood street.  Problem is, the developers along with the city decided to plunk down a few fire lane signs either pointing the wrong way or so far down the street that a normal person would not see it when attempting to park.

The bigger problem is that when these new communities get planned and approved to begin with, why don’t they just plan for a street that is 3 feet wider so they don’t have the argument that “the streets aren’t wide enough for emergency vehicles, so there is no parking anywhere near your condo”.  This is also hypocritical, because the street width in the condo complex is the same as narrow sections of Stocksbridge where parking is allowed so that oncoming vehicles have to take turns passing the parked car.  There it is ok, but on a dead-end quite road in a condo complex with 1 parking space, the visitor is forced to hike blocks in order to visit someone.  Do you think this is poor planning?

That was a bit of a rant, but with the traffic cops saying it is the homeowners fault for not advising their visitors that they can’t park anywhere, to the enforcement officers for slapping $100 tickets as quickly as they can on any poor visitor who comes into the neighborhood in the dark of night with no street lights and no signs to call on a friend.

Come on Oakville, surely there are better ways of making money than that – especially when you are complicit in allowing developers to get away with this to begin with.

For now, I guess it’s better to stay at home.

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