Parking up the wrong tree

IF YOU CHARGE THEM, THEY WON’T COME Recently installed parking meters like these at 14th and Wood Streets aren’t earning their keep.

It’s no secret these are tough economic times for Chicago. Staring down a $469 million budget hole, city leaders are looking for revenue anywhere they can get it. Among the dollar-generating plans are Mayor Daley’s move to tax the use of Dumpsters, the $40 million leasing of Midway to a private company and the installation of more red-light traffic cameras. But the city’s also turning to parking-meter income to save the day.

Last month, the city announced it will convert all 4,000 parking spaces along the lakefront to paid parking by Memorial Day weekend 2009, generating an estimated $700,000 in the next fiscal year. The Park District will use “pay-and-display” boxes that require drivers to purchase a receipt to stick on their windshields. The cost will probably be $1 an hour, says Chicago Park District spokeswoman Jessica Maxey-Faulkner.

These new fees will be a nuisance during turbulent financial times says “The Parking Geek,” who discusses parking issues on his blog, theexpiredmeter.com, and prefers to remain anonymous for legal reasons. “My main concern is we have an economy that is going to body slam Chicagoans,” he says, “and here the administration is laying it on.” But Friends of the Parks president Erma Tranter doesn’t have a problem with the Park District charging people to drive to the beach and hopes the new fees will curtail auto congestion and encourage residents to use greener transportation modes.

Even if they don’t significantly cut down on greenhouse gases, the beachside meters will at least pad the city’s coffers. Not all recent moves to charge for once-free parking have been as commonsensical. In September, 2nd Ward Ald. Robert Fioretti requested and city workers installed 1,250 new meters within an area on the Near West Side bounded by Roosevelt Street, 15th Place, and Damen and Ashland Avenues. Although partially comprising the Illinois Medical District, the majority of the newly metered area is occupied by block-long vacant lots. Hundreds of the new meters—which charge $1 per hour and run 24 hours a day, seven days a week—are going unused. And they’re certainly not cheap; the purchase and installation of the meters cost taxpayers $625,000, according to Ed Walsh, spokesman for the Department of Revenue. Essentially, they aren’t earning their keep. “Considering the city’s budget deficit,” the Parking Geek says, “this seems like a crazy amount to spend on meters that don’t generate revenue.”

The few institutions in the area call the meters a nuisance for employees and visitors. “There shouldn’t be any parking meters in front of a nonprofit religious institution,” says the Zion Baptist Church’s Rev. Jonah Wilson. He visited the alderman’s office shortly after the meters were installed on the streets surrounding his church to discuss how they will hurt his cash-strapped flock and be a distraction to worship and funeral services. “It’s cumbersome for individuals to have to worry about feeding a parking meter when they’re in a state of mourning,” Wilson says. The alderman promised to rectify the situation, Wilson says, but the minister has received no response to additional calls and letters asking for an update.

Even the parts of the metered zone where motorists were parking before the meters went up (i.e., near the Medical District) are now not being used, admits Fioretti’s chief of staff, Chris Karabis. To address this problem, Karabis says Fioretti asked the city to convert all the meters to charge only a quarter per hour and to operate only during business hours. Karabis says the conversion may be done by the end of next week. After the rates are lowered, he’s hoping the cars—and their quarter-popping drivers—will return.