The car impound near the 1000 block of north Sacramento Avenue is hell on a Sunday morning, particularly before April 1st, when the posted no-parking-for-snow bans expire. You know those ridiculously misleading signs that feature a large snowflake and say, "No Parking, October 31 thru April 1, OR WHEN SNOW OVER 2 INCHES"? They are a great haul for the contracted tow company, that, knowing the weekend is when people are out partying late and tourists and suburbanites are in heavily parking-restricted neighborhoods, has trucks out towing all night. Drop by one weekend evening in March and witness the precision with which tow trucks come in and out all night, pulling cars.
If you do, you may want to pay a follow-up visit the next morning, when a line will stretch out of the little wooden shack they call an office down into the street with people waiting to get their cars back. The convoluted process to get your car out — which involves two separate lines (one to claim the car, and one to pay), a requirement that the person who owns the car be present (a big problem for families or rental agencies) — can take as long as two hours (I once spent four hours trying to get a car out of the lot, a nice way to spend a Sunday).
A friend is currently fighting City Hall over an incident wherein a city crew, working on a street overnight, decided to temporarily nail a metal "NO PARKING – TOW ZONE" sign to a high construction awning rather than put up the temporary cardboard ones; he parked his car and got towed. When he returned, he finally saw the sign; but when he returned with a camera, it was gone. Who knows whose cousin has the towing contract for that block at Streets and Sanitation, but this is outrageous.
How about street cleaning signs that slip down trees or hang way too low or, as we've all seen, don't get posted until the very last minute?
Or the story of a friend of mine who got three tickets in one day — one for a bumper hanging over a yellow strip, one for parking in an unposted street parking zone, and one for getting to his car two minutes after his meter, which cost a dollar an hour, had expired. That's $150 in tickets in one day — a whole day's pay for him.
Which brings us to the real injustice of an obscenely restrictive parking regime designed not to keep streets clear, but to generate revenue: for too many Chicagoans, the tickets are a serious financial burden, while at the same time public transportation service is sorely lacking.
Approximately 17 percent of Chicago's households — or about 175,000 households — live at or near the poverty line, earning at the high end $350 a week. What a coincidence — that's $50 a day. A parking ticket for getting to a meter a moment too late can wipe out a day's worth of pay.
And although much of the $210 million the city sees from parking violations probably does come from the more well-heeled and commuters, the way such tickets can disproportionately harm the poor and working families is obscene. Take a drive through a working class neighborhood in this city some time and tally up the number of Denver boots you see on cars; compare with the number you see in Streeterville or Lakeview.
Cities love generating revenue off of parking tickets because it is cost-efficient for them; for every $1 they spend collecting the fines, they get $5 in revenue. That would be peachy if the City of Chicago were a corporation, but it isn't. It is our city and is supposed to serve us. People wouldn't be pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of parking fines into the city if there were a public transportation system that actually worked.
Whereas a round-trip bus ride from Cragin/Hermosa to the West Loop — say from the Cicero block of Grand Avenue to Halsted and Jackson — would cost a Chicagoan $4 and take no less than an hour and a half including waiting time, a drive would probably take no more than a total of half an hour or 45 minutes round trip, costing about $2 in gasoline, assuming average fuel efficiency at current gas prices. Both the opportunity cost and the actual cost direct the sensible person to drive. But of course, the overly restrictive parking regime in this city makes finding a legal parking spot nearly impossible. The cost of commuting to work via CTA is a serious monthly expense for many Chicagoans, especially lower-income people who may work two or more jobs or second or third shifts that make bus transfers unattractive. An additional $4 trip a few times a week can add up to serious dollars.
Yet another way to screen those who can't afford it out of the central business district of the city.
Excessive parking restrictions and enforcement will not discourage people from driving until there is a reasonable, cost effective alternative to driving. If you make it nearly impossible to park for people who have to drive to work, or drive to maneuver the city, those parking tickets essentially become an additional tax, and an ultra-regressive tax. If somebody from a poverty-line household gets even six tickets a year — about $300 a year if they're paid on time — they face fines equivalent to approximately $1,200 for somebody earning $60,000. If that $60,000 individual was spending $1,200 a year on parking tickets, they would be justly furious — the difference is, they could afford to switch to using the CTA despite its cost. Some are not so lucky.
There is no doubt that parking restrictions can free up streets and lessen congestion (and pollution) and they should be enforced. But the more the city sees parking tickets as a dedicated, infinite source of revenue (throw up some more signs, increase the cost of metered parking, and we can get an extra $20,000,000 for my pet project!), the less incentive they have to invest heavily in public transportation, and the more the city will expand restrictions out into neighborhoods that are already over-restricted.
With people shunning the inefficient CTA, retailers and restaurants have to scramble to accommodate customers who are driving. Thus chain retailers and restaurants, that can afford to buy extra property for parking lots, have an advantage over the little guy; and our city is blighted by acres of unnecessary parking lots. When Western Avenue turns into Randall Road, we'll think this nifty source of "free" revenue has taken a disastrous toll.
The goal should be a city with a public transportation system that makes driving a luxury, not a city that punishes you for leaving the neighborhood.
the pet / August 22, 2007 7:55 AM
Oh, the steaming pile of horseshit that is the Chicago Department of Revenue.
Two months ago a friend of mine receives a “Notice of Determination” in the mail, informing her that since she’s been caught by those red light cameras on three separate occasions and ignored all the notices, she’s now way past due, owes the city $540, and that her car is going to be booted at any time.
She never got any notifications.
She took a day off of work to try and straighten all this out.
Nobody would believe that she never go the notifications - she was told that since they never got any pieces returned, that she must have gotten them.
Apparently the city sends out notifications via the US Postal Service. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’re the worst in the nation as far as mail delivery service.
One pissy worker for the city told her that she must have known about those violations, because in the midst of those red light violations, she had a parking ticket that had been paid.
Yep, she was told that since she paid a parking ticket, she MUST have know about the red light violations. Nevermind the fact that my friend kept telling this woman (who must have had a rather large and pointy bug up her ass) that the reason why she paid the parking ticket was because it was affixed to her windshield, so she knew about it.
And then, when it comes to paying tickets, you can’t pay on an installment plan unless you owe LESS than $500 in fines and then you have to pay off a percentage of that $500.
Now, fighting the city and the Post Office has been a giant drain of energy on her. She can’t afford to take more time off work to fight this, she can't afford her car getting booted, and she can’t afford a lawyer. The only thing she can do is pay the city.
And that really sucks, because her and her husband both work very hard - they have bills, student loans and a car note to pay off.
It’s like the city makes it so that nobody can fight back.