Montreal car sharing user shares cautionary tale after hefty parking fines

A Montreal woman is sharing a cautionary tale about car sharing after she got a Communauto bill worth hundreds of dollars.

Lisa Del Fabbro used to take Communauto to work every day and park at a bustling intersection in Montreal’s Garment District. The average trip usually costs less than $20 dollars but what came after was a lot more than that.

Parking in the area is only available for part of the day and that makes it off-limits for the car-sharing platform. But Del Fabbro said she only realized that when the first parking ticket arrived.

"I knew that I was parking around the same area for three months preceeding, so I knew that there was a good chance that there would be a lot of charges. So I think the anxiety of finding that out without actually knowing the extent of that was worse than getting hit with the invoice itself," she said. 

In the end, she was served with a handful of parking tickets amounting to hundreds of dollars. Communauto rules don’t allow for drop-offs in restricted areas, even if parking is legal when you drop it off.

So if no one else picks it up by the cut-off time, the last driver is on the hook for the bill.

After usage costs, processing fees and, of course, the tickets, she says her January invoice from the company was more than $1,200.

"And the thing is, Communauto gets charged the tickets by the city. There's no way for me to fight it with the city or prove my case elsewhere unless I wanted to go to small claims court," she said.

Bernard Levy-Soussan, a lawyer and founder of Montreal-based Ticket911.ca, says that’s a limitation of the car sharing service.

"On a daily basis, we handle here thousands of tickets for drivers, and we do negotiate with the city or the government many kinds of tickets. Most certainly, she would have been able to make a deal with the prosecution on a file like that, to have some of the tickets moved," Levy-Soussan said.

Communauto says they process thousands of tickets every year and that they don't have the resources or ability to fight all of them.

The company said it is aware of the situation, which it called unfortunate, and told CTV News it has waived a portion of the administrative fees.