In the long list of scandals that have hit City Hall this council term, Karen Stintz’s latest brush with the law likely won’t break the top ten.
The TTC chair and councillor for Eglinton-Lawrence was stopped by the police on Thursday, not for driving drunk or being accused of smoking crack cocaine, but for allegedly running a stop sign. On her bicycle.
Stintz was riding from her home in the Yonge and Lawrence area to City Hall when she was pulled over by a police cruiser. She says the officer told her the force was in the midst of a bike safety blitz, and that she had run a stop sign.
“I was assuming I would get a notice about the blitz or some safety awareness or something like that,” she says, “and then he comes back and gives me a ticket for $110 and I’m like, are you kidding me?”
The councillor plans to fight the ticket.
She may have a good chance of beating it too, because according to her the intersection she supposedly blew through at Duplex and Berwick doesn’t even have a stop sign in the southbound direction she was traveling in. According to Google Maps, she’s right.
Angered by the incident, which made her late for a meeting of the striking committee, Stintz took to Twitter Thursday morning to complain that a better use of police resources might be to target drivers illegally using the King Street diamond lanes. The little-known and rarely enforced traffic features are supposed to reserve one lane of the street for transit vehicles during rush hour, and have been in the news lately as the TTC mulls a pilot project to ease congestion on King.
“It seems to me that there would be some time better spent on that initiative than giving people $110 tickets going through a rolling stop where there’s no stop [sign],” Stintz says.
This isn’t the first time Stintz has been stopped on her bike. Last year she was given a warning for failing to come to a complete halt.
The councillor is widely expected to run for mayor next year and has reportedly assembled a campaign team already, but she has yet to openly declare her candidacy. When asked if she thinks her alleged bike infraction might affect her shot at the mayor’s chair, she has a long laugh and looks at the floor.
“There’s no election,” she says.
