Evelyn Shver is tired of waiting.

It’s been almost two years since the 59-year-old bookkeeper from Richmond Hill began requesting a court date to fight a parking ticket she received for leaving her Cadillac in a handicap spot on Orde Street.

The spot was located behind Princess Margaret Hospital where her elderly uncle with mobility issues was receiving cancer treatment in December 2012.

Though she says she had a handicap sticker affixed to her vehicle, Shver said she left the hospital one day to find a $60 parking ticket.

Trying not to burden her uncle, she says she quickly stuffed the ticket into her purse and planned to fight it in court. Nearly two years later, however, she still hasn’t had the chance.

Shver said she applied for a court date within two weeks of receiving the ticket, but has yet to be assigned one.

Currently, the city has 21,000 tickets set for trial by the end of November and about 100,000, or four months’ worth, of requests to be scheduled, explained City of Toronto spokesperson Kazia Fraser in an email.

Reasons for delays vary from case to case, but the average wait for a court date is less than a year. Court date scheduling is done on a priority basis, she wrote, with serious offences involving accessible parking or fire routes taking precedence.

When she visited the city’s parking ticket office at Mel Lastman Square, Shver was told by an attendant she could be waiting for her court date for another year.

“It makes no sense at all,” said Shver. “I don’t understand why it is taking so long.”

Fraser said when people who have received tickets wait a lengthy period of time for a court date, prosecution staff conduct reviews to determine if their wait has been “reasonable.” In cases where it is determined that the delay has been too long and there is no reasonable explanation, prosecution staff can “exercise their discretion to withdraw a charge.”

Each year, she noted, the city hands out 2.6 million tickets, 600,000 of which are challenged. Of those, 130,000 are cancelled, while the remainder are the subject of a request for a trial to challenge the ticket further, or “simply pay or not pay.”

“Of those that proceed to trial, approximately 63 per cent are convicted,” she said. “The vast majority of tickets issued result in payments with overall collection at 83 per cent.”

Though a renewal of driver’s licence or vehicle plates can occur while someone is awaiting a trial, drivers cannot obtain a new licence or plates if they have unpaid tickets and no filed intention to fight them in court.

To speed up the process involved with assigning trial dates, Fraser said, eight court rooms have been dedicated to parking disputes, up from five in 2011. Each courtroom can handle about 30,000 trial requests per year and costs around $1 million.

Fraser said the additional capacity is “helpful,” but that “changes to and greater awareness of the cancellation guidelines together with higher fines, towing, etc., may still not be enough to ensure everyone gets a court date.”

To combat this problem, she said, cities like Brampton and Mississauga have moved towards low-cost resolution processes to end disputes early.

In a June 2011 staff report, the City of Toronto was apprised of one of those processes it called the “fixed-fine system.”

As a deterrent, the fixed-fine system affixes an extra $12.75 to tickets received by people who want to dispute a ticket in court, but then fail to show up. Those who do appear and argue successfully would have no fine imposed.

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The report said that “making more efficient use of the available court capacity for parking tickets will in turn reduce the time to trial for parking ticket recipients who wish to have a trial.”

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