Vancouver parking ticket hotspots: where to watch the meter

If you are going to park on Vancouver's West Broadway, be careful: it's a stretch of road that brings a greater chance of getting a ticket if you let your meter expire.

The City of Vancouver has released statistics that show bylaw officers handed out an average of 57 tickets per day on the busy thoroughfare — six per cent of the total number of tickets handed out in the city.

The second most ticketed road was Homer Street, which averaged roughly half that number of tickets but notably, is a much shorter road.

According to city officials, Vancouver collected $25 million in parking fines last year, on top of more than $40 million from parking meters. For context, the City of Surrey reportedly collected just a fraction of that money on combined parking and parking fine revenues, at a reported $2.65 million.

Ticket policy challenged

There are a number of critics of Vancouver's current parking ticket policies.

Arny Wise is a former Vancouver parking-ticket adjudicator, who sued the city alleging it has an unfair advantage in the current parking ticket dispute policy. The city set up its own adjudication process in 2011 in order to reduce a backlog of disputes in B.C. Provincial Court.

Wise argues the system allows a city adjudicator to act as both prosecutor and judge.

"So it's kind of like a slam dunk most of the time, that is why the conviction rate is 95 per cent in the city and 80 per cent province wide," he said.