It didn’t take long for the little red Bug from Florida to become a curious fixture of a short downtown lane near Church and Bloor Sts.

For three months, the Volkswagen Beetle regularly sat in the no-parking zones fronting the condo building at 100 Hayden St., amassing an impressive ticket collection.

It stayed on the street for long stretches, at all hours, often day-in and day-out.

“We said, ‘You know you’re getting tickets, right?’” said Mayela Sanchez, who lives in a nearby building and frequently saw a woman driving the car. “She never said anything.”

Employees at the nearby bookstore wondered how the car was staying there for so long, said receptionist Betty Maharaj.

“We called and got it ticketed,” said Sandy Maraj, the property manager for the condo building. “There would be several tickets on the car … She would crumple up the tickets and put them in the flower pots.”

The car was ticketed 70 times for parking on Hayden St. between May and July, with fines totaling nearly $2,500. But it was just one of the Bug’s illegal parking spots in Toronto over the past five years.

Mike Guluk, the car’s Canadian owner, who spends half his time in Florida, has been fined $33,965 for 1,053 parking tickets issued between January 2008 and August 2012.

“It’s almost like a joke,” said Guluk, who lived in the Hayden St. condo for three months and says it was his wife, Sandy, who drove the car this summer. “(The parking officers) know me, they laugh about it and they say, ‘Well, here’s another ticket.’”

Guluk is among the city’s top out-of-province parking offenders. He and two other car owners — one from New York, fined $36,735 for 1,088 tickets, the other from Alberta, fined $35,980 for 1,062 — form Toronto’s top trio of careless out-of-town parkers.

But they are just the peak of a sizeable heap. Between January 2008 and August 2012, the top 24 out-of-province offenders racked up $592,070 in parking fees, according to data obtained through an information request and analysis by the Star’s Matthew Cole.

More in the Star: Out-of-province scofflaws, by the numbers

One Quebec driver accrued more than $17,000 in tickets in 2011 alone. Many cars, including vehicles with Maine, West Virginia and British Columbia plates, park month after month in the same places.

The identities of the drivers are kept secret by the city. Officials say the disclosure would be an unjustified invasion of privacy.

In all, there are about 50 repeat out-of-province offenders known to parking authorities. A dismal 16 per cent of all out-of-province drivers pay their tickets. So the vast majority of these drivers are taking advantage of Toronto’s unofficial complimentary visitor parking.

The city is “handcuffed” when it comes to forcing out-of-province drivers to pay up, said Anthony Fabrizi, manager of Toronto’s parking operations.

A big problem is that the municipal government cannot access data held by jurisdictions outside Ontario, meaning it can’t learn the name or address of a vehicle’s owner to collect the outstanding fine.

The city has canvassed “worst offender” areas, including Michigan, Ohio, New York and Quebec, for information-sharing agreements, but many governments cite privacy issues, Fabrizi said.

In 2006, Toronto began purchasing licence information from provinces or states for about $7 a plate. The pilot project netted around $10,000 but cost approximately $12,000. It was scrapped after a year.

The city has also considered hiring collection agencies for individual drivers like Guluk, who have racked up thousands in unpaid tickets. But Fabrizi claimed the costs of employing a collection agency outweighed the total owed and “it simply made no sense.”

The pay-back rate for in-province tickets, about 82 per cent, is among the highest in North America thanks to Ontario’s plate denial system, which halts licence renewal for cars with unpaid tickets. But Fabrizi said a reciprocal arrangement with other jurisdictions would be difficult, since few others have the plate denial program.

In a painfully polite — perhaps desperate — attempt, council even considered issuing notices rather than tickets on illegally parked out-of-province vehicles, nicely asking drivers to obey the rules. (That idea has yet to be put to the test.)

The city has since abandoned attempts to get scofflaws to pay up. The reason? It doesn’t want to scare away tourists, especially not after a “banner year” in 2011, Fabrizi said.

“We want visitors’ experience to be pleasant,” Fabrizi said. “If they get a ticket where we recognize they don’t have knowledge of the parking rules or what have you, the city is taking the approach that we don’t want to pursue these folks aggressively.”

The thinking is that tourists inject more money into the city than the average $30 parking ticket, Fabrizi said.

He adds that it would be a slippery slope determining which out-of-province offenders warrant using a collection agency or other aggressive means to make drivers pay.

“We take the approach that all out-of-province plate holders get the exemption, based on the better good of the city,” he said.

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The city is aware that some offenders are not just stopping in for the weekend (“The one I know, his girlfriend lives here, so he comes here for months at a time,” Fabrizi said.) Other big offenders are commercial trucks from outside of Ontario.

But in the overall parking scheme, out-of-province tickets make up a small portion of Toronto’s total — 115,000 out of 2.8 million, or just under 5 per cent — so council has opted not to pursue anyone, Fabrizi said.

The city will occasionally tow out-of-province vehicles with tickets, but generally officials only tow when a vehicle is impeding pedestrian or vehicular travel. And unlike what’s seen in the reality TV show Parking Wars, officials would never boot a vehicle (locking the car in place with a wheel clamp) due to mischief laws, Fabrizi said.

The out-of-province free-for-all may have an end in sight, however. By late next year or early 2014, council will vote on the use of automated hand-held devices to provide up-to-date information about repeat offenders.

Information about cars with unpaid parking tickets would be uploaded to officers’ devices each day, similar to a system already in place for stolen vehicles. When they encounter a vehicle with more than three unpaid parking tickets, for instance, they would tow it, Fabrizi said.

But until then, out-of-province scofflaws will face no consequences — something Guluk says is only fair in his situation.

“As far as I’m concerned, I don’t owe the city any money, because those tickets should never, ever have been issued in the first place,” he said.

Guluk says he tried on multiple occasions to obtain a parking permit on a nearby residential street for a former residence on Mount Pleasant Rd., but was turned down.

“You try and do the right thing, but the ridiculous city policies don’t allow you to do anything, so what else are you supposed to do?”

He says he was told by parking officials that cars from outside of Ontario are issued tickets but later cancelled. He believes it helps officers meet a parking ticket quota, and says he was told that as long as he moved the car every 48 hours it would never be towed. It became “irrelevant” if an out-of-province car like his got two or three tickets a day, he said.

“Am I proud of the fact that I have accumulated 1,000-plus parking tickets?” he wrote in an email to the Star, following a phone conversation with a reporter. “Of course not, but if the law is an ass ...”

Fabrizi said he could not speak to what individual officers told Guluk, but said all tickets are issued consistently, no matter where the car is from.

Guluk’s kids continue to drive the car around the city, and Guluk hasn’t arranged for a provincial licence because he “just never got around to it.” He says he has never been contacted by the city for payment.

He also denied that he and his wife used to discard their parking tickets in flower pots or tree wells outside the Hayden St. condo.

“I can assure that both my wife and I would never ever do that,” he said in the email. “I may be a scofflaw (what a great word) when it comes to parking, but not when it comes to the environment.”

Data analysis by Matthew Cole

Tuesday: The most, and least, ticketed neighbourhoods.