Parking at UBC

As is the case at just about every university in the world, the students, staff and faculty at the University of British Columbia loathe and detest the people who control parking. Unlike most other places, somebody got so fed up that he took them to court, hitting the university with a class-action suit claiming that they had no legal right to impose fines or to tow or impound parked vehicles. (UBC Parking had impounded his legally parked car because they claimed he owed $200 in parking fines.)

Four years later, a judge has ruled that UBC is 'ultra vires' with respect to parking fines, meaning that imposing fines is outside the limits of their legal authority. However they still have the right to regulate parking, to tow and impound illegally parked cars, and to charge the costs of towing and storage to the owners of the cars. UBC responded with a carefully worded press release, intended to convince us that we still must pay for parking.

At present UBC only tows cars that are blocking emergency access or in a disabled-parking spot, that someone has complained about, or that have at least 4 unpaid fines. That's only 1 or 2 cars per day.

I haven't yet found a clear explanation of the real implications of this decision for people who park at UBC. (I park here only occasionally, when cycling isn't appropriate, but I always grudge the $5.) So here's my interpretation:

UBC can tell us where to park, and it can do its best to charge us for access to that parking. In the parkades this will work fine most of the time, because you usually can't get out until you pay. But in the open lots you pay at a machine and leave the payslip on your dashboard. Until now the lots were checked at random times every day and if your car was caught without a payslip it was ticketed and you were fined; if you accumulated four fines your car might be impounded. Now UBC has no authority to collect fines, so if they give you a ticket you can ignore it. In principle I think they could legally impound every car that didn't pay, but in practice they won't do that (if only because their impound lot is far too small).

The class-action suit asked that UBC pay back the ~$4 million in fines that it collected between 1990 and 2005. (That's only about half of the fines it has issued - who knew that half of all fines remain unpaid?) Whether UBC has to do this hasn't been decided yet.

The obvious next step is for UBC to install pay-gates at the entrances/exits to the parking lots, but until they do I'm not paying for parking.