WATCH ABOVE: Rachel Lau reports on a number of residents who are now coming forward with complaints about the InfoNeige app.
MONTREAL — Dominic Coculuzzi considers himself a good NDG-er. He knows the parking schedule near his house by heart.
“There’s certain days that you can’t park on each side, so usually Mondays and Thursdays you can’t park, so you just switch the sides and you don’t have a problem,” he explained.
Coculuzzi is recovering from a herniated disc, so he tries to park his car as close to home as possible.
“I waited until 3 a.m., watched the snow crew remove the snow, went downstairs and spoke to the crew chief who drives behind them and asked if it was OK to park,” he said.
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There were still “no parking” signs on the road, but the chief replied “yes,” that crews had finished clearing the snow and it was OK to park.
The next day, Coculuzzi woke up to find his car gone.
“There was no snow, there was nothing,” he said.
“I just can’t understand why they gave it [a ticket] to me.”
Coculuzzi is the latest in a string of NDG residents who say they’ve received tickets this winter —at $118 apiece.
READ MORE: NDG resident blames city’s ‘INFO-Neige’ app for parking ticket
“We do what they say, we listen to them,” he said.
“We have Info-Neige. We have these apps that are supposed to be the best thing lately and even there you have a lot of errors and yup, we still get the tickets.”
The City of Montreal said there are no glitches with the Info-Neige app. While the app updates several times a day, that doesn’t mean residents can ignore the signs on the street.
“Long-term, we plan to make it automated and it should be in real-time,” explained Harout Chitilian, a Montreal city councillor.
“We were very clear that initially it [updates] four times a day.”
Yet, residents insist the app is letting them down.
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Coculuzzi is getting together with other NDG residents to contest their fines. They’re even considering a possible lawsuit.
“I have absolutely no problem paying a ticket if I’m at fault, but if the city’s at fault, then they should take responsibility and stop blaming everybody else,” he told Global News.
Erika Kastaniotis, a lawyer with Yves Menard Lawyers Inc, points out the residents may be better off contesting individually on a case-by-case basis.
“If I was parked on the street and I got towed and you were parked on another street, two streets over and you got towed, contesting our tickets together won’t have much of an impact because it’s two different conditions completely,” she explained.
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Nevertheless, Coculuzzi insists win or lose the legal battle, the borough needs to get its act together before more residents get slapped with a fine.
But, he admits he won’t be sticking around much longer. Coculuzzi plans to move to the Plateau.
“I’ve been dealing with this for ten years,” he said. “It’s frustrating.”
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