If you've ever received a parking ticket in the vicinity of Dawson College, you're not alone.
Figures obtained by Radio-Canada from the city of Montreal and the Montreal Municipal Court show the parking station located just outside Dawson's back entrance at 4001 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W. has been the area where Montreal's Green Onions have been the busiest over the last couple of years.
They've handed out 4,330 of them between January 2015 and this past October. The fines from those 4,330 tickets totalled $227,228.
That's nearly twice as many tickets as the next busiest location — CEGEP André-Laurendeau in LaSalle, where 2,730 tickets totalling more than $140,000 were handed out.
Dawson College is located on the fringe of downtown, adjacent to the city of Westmount, and doesn't have a parking area of its own, while André-Laurendeau does.
In addition, the investigation reveals that several other locations in the vicinity of Dawson, including the intersection of Ste. Catherine St. W and Chomedey, the intersection of Ste. Catherine and St. Marc, and the intersection of Ste. Catherine and Wood in Westmount. are also in the top 12.
Areas around hospitals, including Montreal General Hospital, the Verdun General Hospital, and the Maisonneuve-Rosemont hospital, are also busy spots for parking tickets.
Others include the area around Complexe Guy-Favreau, Mount Royal Park, both Concordia University campuses, and the area around New City Gas, near the corner of Wellington and Shannon in Griffintown.
In all, more than 1.4 million parking tickets were given out island-wide, worth more than $153 million — not counting the ones which have been successfully contested in court.