When Montreal streets were littered with abandoned cars

 Until the 1970s, thousands of defunct, rusty and decaying cars were simply abandoned by motorists on city streets each year.
    In  1969, 5,000 cars were left so heartlessly, in 1971, 8,000 wrecks were discarded on public roads.
  Why? Motorists had to pay $20 to scrap a vehicle.
  Simply leaving it on the road was free.
   Owners would just remove the plates and anything else linking them to the car and just leave them to rot.
   Favourite spots to abandon your vehicle included streets to the north of Jarry Park (seen in the photo) and De Maisonneuve west of Decarie and on Hochelaga.
   Their presence impeded snow removal operations.
   A few years later scrap dealers started offering modest sums for kaput vehicles, thus killing the inane vehicular littering.
  Montreal's car pound on Papineau opened in 1957 and had only 220 cars taken in that year so the numbers exploded fast.
 The total of 8,000 cars at the pound in 1971 included vehicles that had been towed or accidented. Owners had 60 days to recover their cars and had to pay $2 per day. The pound resold the wrecks in packets of 20 at a cost of about $15 per unit.
    Police made no attempt to determine who abandoned the cars. Too much work. In many cases the identification number had been filed off or otherwise destroyed.