Drivers beware: Parking spots painted on a street in Toronto may be tempting to hop in the car only to be ticketed a month later.
CBC News reported Thursday that in just three weeks of August, eight motor vehicles have been picked up by the city of Toronto when drivers filled in three parking spaces between Sherbourne and Bryan streets.
The spots appear to be painted “park & pay” on the road, with tiny white outlines of each side of the street on which parking is allowed. But the spots are in reality “stay & pay,” and drivers say they are constantly bumping into the white outlines.
Toronto Parking Authority spokeswoman Haridimos Didos said Toronto drivers are mistaken about the city’s parking system.
“The idea is that you just drive up the street, park, turn around and get out,” she told CBC News. “You don’t actually get a ticket when you park here.”
The only time a ticket could be issued would be if the car was parked in the zone designated as spaces for both parking and pedestrian.
That said, Didos told CBC News that drivers caught parking in spaces designated for paying or for both parking and pedestrians have been warned.
“We did raise the issue with council,” she said. “We don’t want people to use [this situation] as a cause for ticketing, because it shouldn’t be something that’s happening on the street.”
Didos added that drivers sometimes park on the street during the morning rush hour for “the wee hours,” and during busier hours of the day, trucks can be parked in the spaces, too.
According to CBC News, since the problem began, the city of Toronto has started doing daily “top toppers” and “jiggles” of the marks at the spots to discourage drivers from using them.
One driver said she was unable to park in a spot two doors down from a bike rack.
Toronto is not the only place in the world where confusion over parking regulations is a problem.
In South Korea, drivers find it baffling that they are not allowed to park across a sidewalk for hours, according to the New York Post. The situation is even worse in Thailand, where a handful of streets seem to use diagonal parking as a ticket trap, writing fines on diagonal markings instead of in the street.
In countries like Ukraine, drivers just try to “park without parallel parking,” a driver in Kiev told local media.