14 Parking Tickets

Plus false accusations and broken mirrors.

Part 1: A Fisherman, a Truck & a Train Horn

Screen capture from Mark’s video. A city employee urinates on the street. Click image to watch Mark’s 30 second video.

Mark, a commercial fisherman from Nova Scotia, spent three weeks on Sussex Drive, his big truck parked directly in front of Canada's national art gallery. Eventually he became friendly with a member of the Ottawa police force. At the beginning, relations weren't so cordial. The officer, he says, accused the truckers of "peeing all over the streets." Mark said he hadn't witnessed anything of the sort.

Shortly afterward, he recorded a video of a city worker climbing out of a payloader and doing just that in broad daylight.

So when the cop come back, I said 'What about the city guys? Are they allowed to do that?'

'No, they're not allowed.'

'Well, here you go. I'm gonna show you something. I got the guy on video. I was standing there all by myself and I said, 'What's he doing? He's having a pee!'

Mark laughs and says the cop "never mentioned it again." Instead, he became quite helpful. "Yeah, you're parked in an illegal spot," Mark remembers him saying, "you're gonna get a parking ticket."

All told, Mark collected 14 of them during his time in Ottawa. "Some, I was getting a couple a day. Then they'd leave me alone for a while." More than once, the officer told him "If you wanna leave, call me and I'll get everything moved and we'll guide you right out."

One morning Mark did call. Overnight, baseball-sized rocks had been placed in the crotches of a row of trees near the sidewalk where he was parked.

I took a picture of them and I said, 'This here is what I woke up to this morning.' So he come down with another guy, and they removed them all. And it was down the whole street. It was just weird. I had no idea what they was doing with them rocks. Maybe people was trying to get people worked up and start throwing rocks. But anyway, they removed them and they never come back.

On another occasion, vandals loosened the caps on both of his truck's fuel tanks and stuffed broken branches from the same trees into the openings.

Returning to his truck yet another day, he found a shipping pallet had been thrown onto the hood, and that both his side mirrors had been broken off.

next installment: You Can Interview That Front Tire