Leader of the Pack

The first item on the agenda for the April 8th meeting of City Council's Public Works and Infrastructure Committee is headed "City of Toronto Receives the Canadian Motorcycle Association Government Award" [PDF]. As the agenda was released Wednesday, we considered it an April Fools' joke, in the brief moment before we remembered that bureaucrats don't have a sense of humour.

The Canadian Motorcycle Association (or "Canmocycle," as its url abbreviates it), whose "Government Award" is given "for actions taken or policies, laws, statutes and the like implemented that have benefited motorcyclists and the use of motorcycles" [PDF] is quite pleased, you see, that the City of Toronto offers motorcycles free streetside parking [PDF], something we'd never really thought about before. Turns out that this policy was a result of a September 2005 motion by Councillor Case Ootes, the "taciturn Dutchman," who sold it primarily as an environmental initiative—his resolution cited both the Kyoto Protocol and the One-Tonne Challenge—but was really about the fact that pay-and-display metres are useless for regulating vehicles on which you can't securely display a printed ticket: "other motorists often steal their Pay and Display parking receipts," Ootes wrote [PDF].

Sigh. The Toronto Parking Authority is probably happy, though. That the epic failures that are the pay-and-display machines have inadvertently netted the City an award is probably the TPA's greatest accomplishment in years. The photo that will be taken of committee chair Glenn De Baeremaeker with the CMA representatives is sure to be a thing of beauty, though. Let's hope Miller lends him the jacket.