The main reason far fewer parking tickets were handed out in January, says the city, is because the bylaw officers responsible for parking enforcement were busy setting up the new parking app.
The MacKay Pay parking app, which allows Yellowknife drivers to pay for meter time over their smartphones, went live on Jan. 2.
The month of January saw a dramatic decline in reported instances of vehicles parked at empty meters: 70 cases versus 395 in December 2017, and 702 cases the same time one year ago in January 2017.
Kerry Penney, the city's director of Policy, Communications and Economic Development said the drop in parking tickets was largely because the two parking enforcement officers put a great deal of time in January toward putting parking app stickers on the meters.
For this reason, she said, the officers “were not actively enforcing parking meter violations to the same extent.”
Penney wanted to clarify a report in Yellowknifer ("Parking meter violations down: head of bylaw," Feb. 21), from information presented at a council meeting.
In his Feb. 19 update to city council on Municipal Enforcement Division (MED) activities, MED manager Doug Gillard, did not say parking enforcement had been relaxed during the month of January.
He only told council that the two bylaw officers tasked with parking enforcement had done a “tremendous amount of work rolling (the app) out and getting the stickers on and transferring the meters in and out of the meter shop.
“We couldn't have done it without these two,” he said.
Gillard went on to say that about 75 per cent of the city's parking meters are connected to the app, and most of the busier areas have been covered.
He said the app is averaging 80 transactions daily and “that number is climbing every week.”
“It's quite successful and we anticipate its' going to be a very successful program for people to pay.”