Parking Lot Company Allegedly Scamming Motorists, The Star Backs Down
Don't you just love it when profit-grubbing companies keep inching their hand further into your pocket to make sure they grabbed every last dime? That seems to be exactly what went down this week on Commissioners Street near the Cirque du Soleil show, as Accordion Guy wrote about on his blog yesterday.
The scam supposedly involved an Impark employee laying down orange pylons along the road before the Cirque showswhere free parking was available, no doubt to entice drivers to opt for the nearby parking lots instead.
What's worse? The Toronto Star initially wrote two stories about this on October 20th and 22nd, but later made a very cryptic retraction about the whole thing. So what happened here?
Did The Star get bullied into submission? Or was this a genuine error on the writer's part?
When they approached the employee dropping the pylons on a public road, he claimed he worked for "the parking." As Joey mentioned, this raises a couple questions; Who owns the lots, and who in fact authorized this guy to take public road service into their own hands? Furthermore, should the city be taking action here in the face of blatant abuse of public services?
If anything, I'd say this warrants a follow-up story or explanation from The Star.
Have you come across this kind of thing before on the roads? Sound off in the comments.
Photo from the original Star article and Joey deVilla
Comments (11)
Weird story. But when it comes to pylons blocking street parking areas, I'm often suspicious of their presence.
The bold answer is to simply park there anyways. However, who knows what evil the parking attendants will bring upon your vehicle... uh, "by accident" of course.
Well the thing is, how can you assume that all pylons are fake? Sometimes they could be legitimate in which case you'd end up getting legitimate tickets that need to be paid or being legitimately towed...
is there a law that prohibits parking when someone puts pylons on the road? how do TV/film crews just get to lay them out and reserve the area? what really stops one from moving the pylons, parking there etc.?
The CdS parking lots were not run by Impark, they were run by another company, name escapes me but their logo is a black and yellow ring around some text all on a yellow background.
It is just another indication of the lawless free-for-all that the City of Toronto has become. If companies or citizens can scam and bilk people out of money without any fear of consequence, they will. All part of our the fun in our new 'great city to live in'.
That was the most read story on thestar.com the day it came out...pretty shoddy reporting (by 'the fixer'!) on their part to name the wrong parking company, though it doesn't make the real perpetrator any less heinous.
Also, to those that don't know, fluorescent orange pylons have IMMENSE coercive authority in democratic societies. We're soft.
There were two different parking lots at Commissioner and Cherry. The guy who ran the place on the day I went looked pretty scary, I wouldn't dare to move his pylons.
There may be others as well but the main parking lot seemed to be run by Unit Park, some of their signs are still there. Unit Park runs the parking lot for TorStar and has a testimonial on the Unit park web site...
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