28 quarters? That's ridiculous. Chicago would have been somewhat wise to install credit card kiosks like those used in Seattle (and other areas). They're solar powered, take change (up to 25 coins), and handle card purchases as low as 25 cents. One drawback to the change is that Visa will require that Chicago mandate a 25 cent minimum for parking. But it doesn't sound like that would be a big deal here, at $3.50 per hour.

This is the perfect example of capitalism working itself out. The market has decided that it's worth it to drive or walk an extra block or two and park somewhere else than it is to pay several dollars and hour to park close.

When did paying a parking attendant 11.00/hr become so great a burden that the service had to be privatized?

Now they have a person making 9.00/hr doing the same job and they've raised rates above equilibrium.

WTF???

I live in a "critical parking area" in Minneapolis. This means that if nearby consumers are too cheap to pay the meters around the corner and instead park on my residential street, I can't park near my home. This means that I often have to carry groceries through snow, ice, and wind through a dangerous neighborhood at night. Yes, it's my choice to live here, but if my city privatized its parking meters in the way Chicago did, my daily life would be inconvenienced and endangered.

@Randy Treibel: agreed $7 an hour is ridiculously expensive.

Most of the time when I go into a big city, I take public transit. Sure it has its drawbacks, but its cheaper than paying to park and I don't have to worry about finding a place to park a care in a busy downtown core.

Montreal's parking is $3/hour which is pretty high. But they provide you a great benefit. The parking spots are all labeled. If you walk across town and need to refill the meter, you just walk up to ANY of the kiosks, type in your parking spot label and pay. No need to go back and put stupid stickers or sheets of paper in your car.

Of course at $3/hour it doesn't really make sense to stay in one spot for more than about 3-4 hours before just parking at a lot is more cost effective. Still I thought it was a decent idea.

On the brighter side, Chicago will be getting more exercise.

What's that? 28 quarters? hmmm... i seem to be short. I do happen to have some thermite handy, however.

I wouldn't mind the increased rates if it weren't for the expanded hours. It used to be that I could go out for dinner at 5:30, put one quarter in the meter and forget about it since many meters only had to be paid until 6pm.

Now it seems like they ALL have to be paid until 9 which means if I want to go to a bar or movie after dinner I have to hike back to the goddamned meter to feed it again at 7:30. If I have after dinner plans I have to make sure I park AFTER 7 so I don't have to feed the meter again. It's a pain in the ass that has resulted in me going out less.

@Randy Treibel: Capitalism can't really work here because demand is somewhat inelastic. You're always going to have people going into the city. So despite the price increase, you don't have a corresponding decrease in demand. Also there isn't any actual competition, unless you count parking lots. Though I assume that there must not be many parking lots, since those should see a corresponding increase in business as people are 'driven' (haha) to them due to the high cost of meter parking.

I am a Chicagoan and this is a hot issue that has me all riled up. There are those who say "Stop whining and walk or drive," but that doesn't stop the fact that this is a terrible deal for the city and over-taxed Chicagoans. I walked yesterday to a neighborhood called Andersonville. I noticed a string of meters on a bustling part of Clark Street were flashing "E." There was a forlorn family huddled around a meter looking generally confused and panicked. For more anecdotal evidence, look no further than this Web site. I discovered it in the comments section of a Friday 3-20 Chicago Tribune article. A YMCA resident actually beat a parking meter with a concrete block. Clearly, people are frustrated.http://theexpiredmeter.com/?p=2318

Easy Solution:
#1. Check to see when the Chicago PD has its shift change and when the lowest density of police officers are on the road.
#2. Support local hardware store by purchasing 12 pound lump hammer.
#3. Apply lump hammer "Fight-Club" style to multiple meters in order to disable them, not destroy. Bashing the glass and the change slot would be good. It often costs way more to replace parts than to change out the whole system.
#4. If 2/3 are too aggressive for you, a caulking gun full of epoxy or silicone works just as well in the coin slot.
#5 Cackle as you see news reports of the private company decrying the vandalism of their meters.

Remember to wear gloves and a Guy Fawkes mask!

It's only a matter of time before boycott turns into vandalism.

I'm avoiding the parking meters like the plague now. On Saturday I went to get my hair cut, rather than parking right out front of the salon (as I would normally do), I parked a 5 minute walk away, on a residential street with no permit required. This works for places away from the city center (I was at Damen & Lawrence), but if you're anywhere where parking is normally a problem, it makes things exponentially worse, because street parking isn't really an option.

One thing I haven't heard talk about is that we pay the highest sales tax rate in the nation at 10.25%. Why are we being fleeced for even more?

@Randy Treibel: Yep, watching a company with a monopoly on a public good (the side of the street outside store x) raise prices way past the equilibrium point is a pretty good show of capitalism at work... Too bad the other capitalists (the stores) have to suffer.

@chumas why not just go the ole cool hand luke method. and cut the pipe supportting the meter?

This approach by Chicago misses the point entirely. This is especially confusing when the Mayor purports to be "green".

The better alternative was to remove the meters entirely, in favor of a "muni-meter" system - a box that dispenses parking permits to be displayed on the car's dash or inside the window (via an adhesive strip) for a specific section, usually that blcok only. These are currrently used across the US, including NYC and Portland, among other cities.

Benefits are that the parking rates can be varied remotely by the City depending on demand, time of day, day of the week, etc. They can also be paid for with credit cards and (in Portland anyway) by cell phones.

Individual parking meters are no longer an efficient system. These "muni-meters" are more reliable and require less man-power to collect payments.

Pay parking is a disincentive to use cars in congested urban core areas. Parking pricing plans must be thought out concurrently with the pricing of other transportation alternatives, namely bus and rail. Traffic management is a comprehensive approach, not just a pricing game to increase revenue from a single source. The idea is to achieve a balance between convenience and resource conservation.

If Chicago is really serious about this, their parking policy would be combined with a type of resident-only parking permit system for these nearby neighborhoods. Pain in the neck? Yes, but it works in DC and other congested cities where resident parking is in short supply. In those areas, non-residents should not intrude in a neighborhood just to save some money.

The above approaches have been used by US cities for several years. Chicago needs to change with the times, not just charge $14/hour in quarters.

We need a serious revolution in this country. If the first step is boycotting asinine parking meters, so be it.

You will see a lot of businesses fail in the area. So what if there is a sale in the area, I don't walk around with 20-odd quarters in my pocket and I am not going to risk having to pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket. I'll just go somewhere else that allows me to park for free. People are pinching pennies, willing to go out of their way to save a few bucks. Not willing to pay a few bucks for convenience in this day and age.
You will see businesses torn down and be turned into parking lots, park for $10 all day! and not risk a ticket.... I have a feeling these business districts are going to see an economic downturn and the small guy being forced out by the Mayor's decision.

@jp7570: They use those pay boxes in Seattle, too. They work pretty well, although motorcyclists complain that the tags are often stolen off their rides. If you pay with a credit card and that happens you can use the receipt to contest the ticket. (I do this when I park my convertible with the top down, although so far I've never had a tag stolen.)

You also have to watch out, because they'll mark spaces in front of fire hydrants and then ticket you if you park in them.

On the plus side, the tags are universal -- you can drive to another spot and park in it on the same tag if you still have time left.

@Mobius:

It's already happened.

[theexpiredmeter.com]

@logicalnoise
Cheaper to replace the whole meter, and much more quickly too. The method I'm suggesting means a technician coming out to repair, about 2 hours of labor worth of time.

Chumas : Sounds nice, except for the A: Illegality of it. and B: Parking at, or being found parking at, a disabled meter still gets someone a ticket. So someone who DID put in the money gets a ticket because the meter is now disabled.

Overall, this is a good example of why privatization is not always a positive. Some things are, disturbingly enough, best done by the government.

Oh, one other thing about the pay boxes. I notice the clocks are almost always ahead of real time. It's struck me that if they calibrated them to run a little fast overall they could skim more revenue over time, since each minute you paid for would be a little shorter than an actual minute. It'd be interesting for someone who lives near one of these boxes ought to sync a known accurate clock to it and see if this is what they're up to.

@satoru: Still, it seems they are pricing themselves out of the market. Your statement about 'inelastic demand' seems to not be entirely true, based on the limited evidence in this story.

Heh, downtown parking in my town is a nickel an hour and you can pay a penny for 12 minutes. Gotta love small(ish) town living.

@Mobius: I saw someone actually kicking one of the privatized meters yesterday. They require payment from 6am-9pm, 7 days a week. Glad I don't have a car.

@satoru: Genius. I hope the next big city I visit has this. Actually, the wife and I have been thinking about Montreal for a while now...

@Brian Parisi: ...or just go out in the suburbs.

@GildaKorn: I believe that's what the new company plans to do, but they just took over jurisdiction of the meters a few weeks ago.

[www.chicagotribune.com]

@GildaKorn: The privatization deal mandates that credit cards be accepted within six months, so those devices are coming.

In the meantime, there are widespread reports of meters breaking because they are stuffed full of quarters. Ooops.

I work in River North (the neighborhood immediately north of the Loop, just across the river) and I'm still seeing all meters and spaces being used just as much as they were prior to the pricing changes (difficult to find an open spot). Very weird. I'm not sure where people are getting all of these quarters.

@Randy Treibel: The problem is that two or three blocks away is permit parking only and the people with out permits park in those spots and then the people that live there have no place to park. Sadly you hardly ever see tickets in those areas and the people that get them simply ignore them.

@Catskyfire
I could care less about the legality of it, as I've been doing something similar in my own home town for the past year.
There is an intersection with a redlight camera facing only one direction which has caused quite a few accidents and one death because of people trying to dodge through, etc. The town council has refused to remove the camera because they gain revenue from it, well, did until I started shooting the lens out a year ago with a very large slingshot.
Since then, no deaths and fewer accidents. Sometimes one must justify vandalism for the greater good and safety.

@Brian Parisi: Yeah it was cool to do that, now I have to use parking garages or valets. Both turned-out to be fine. The annoying thing is the areas and places that do not have nearby parking lots or valet service. You have to go and feed the meter until 9pm now.

I just did the math, and I think the city was SERIOUSLY underpaid for the parking meters.

1.15B works out to 15M/yr or $42,000/Day. There are 35,000 parking meters. With the rates at a minimum of $1.00 an hour each parking meter has GOT to be generating $2.00/day. That's going to double in 2013. Assuming that each meter makes conservatively $2.00/day without increase for the next 75 years, Morgan Stanley will make at MINIMUM 1.916B in gross profit. I realize they have to take operating costs out of that.

Still, the city was completely short sighted and stupid to take away a constant and growing stream of revenue for pennies on the dollar. Parking tickets alone could pay for the operating costs, the rest would be pure profit!

Either that or the Mayor's nephew works at Morgan Stanley and is up for a big promotion.

Ahhh the law of unintended consequences!

This kind of bullshit is why I love small town living. I am 28 and I have never paid any money into a parking meter. Ever.

I realize in a big city you have to have some kind of regulation on the parking, or people would leave shit parked in front of active businesses for weeks at a time. But 28 quarters? That's insane. And since it's Chicago, someone's getting a cut which ensures that it'll stay that way for a long time.

@Chumas: i prefer the bottle of whiskey/pipe-cutter method myself...

@ exploded

I agree. Our tax here in Chicago is insane. I work at GameStop (I know. Evil.), and people complain how they have to pay an extra $6.14 for a $60 game. The recent Resident Evil 5 Collector's Edition was $90. There's roughly $10 in tax!

And they want to raise it to 10.7%. Do they want people to live in this city?

We have a joke at work when it comes to the city tax. We say, "Thanks Todd Stroger".

St. Louis is still $0.50 per hour

There need to be more public protests in this country. I would say that this deserves one.

Rake people over the coals with high taxes (face it, parking fees are a hidden form of taxation) and the people will eventually say "enough!!!!"

@exploded: Read the story... parking tickets do go to the city.

@satoru: @tc4b:

Guys, christ, look: stop. You are actually giving me a headache here.

@tc4b: & this is eventually what will happen, causing a huge drain of business from the downtown area. epic fail, chicago.

@David Brodbeck: yeah, I have an awesome way to defeat that sticker system. Save up a million of those little stickers and put them on a hanger that hangs from your window crack. That way when you park you have a million stickers on your window and the meter maid would have to check every single one to find the current sticker. They probably won't do that so you can park for free hahahaha

@wallspray (reply isn't working for me) - I realize that parking tickets still go to the city. What my point is, is that the city could fund the entire parking system with parking tickets alone. The revenue brought in from meters would essentially be all profit.

Rather than splitting the cost for a comparitively meager up-front cost, the city could have kept it, and had a major source of income.

Lame City shit.