Government can’t get school children to read at grade level or adequately protect citizens from predators, but it can make your life a living hell when it comes to finding a reasonable parking space.
It used to be that the subject of parking fit somewhere alongside shopping for facial tissue or changing the furnace filter: a mere practicality sandwiched between important tasks.
But now, as the flap over unpaid parking tickets by city employees continues to evolve, the fact of too little space and too many cars in a crowded city such as Chicago has suddenly become the centerpiece of an urban ruckus.
It involves millions of dollars in city revenue, political bickering, special interests, neighborhood wars, the health of businesses and the daily grief of thousands of citizens attempting to go about their lives–and park at the same time.
Now, the city has reached civic gridlock on a problem long talked about, long deferred, but not fully anticipated–or at least not put in such dramatic relief–until City Clerk James Laski blew the whistle on more than 6,000 city workers who avoided paying $2.3 million in overdue parking fines and water bills.
Then, late Friday, the city offered new information that government workers, including bus drivers and school employees, owe more than $6 million in overdue parking fines and water bills.
By week’s end, Mayor Richard Daley announced that he would commission a comprehensive study of the city’s parking problems and declared that the chaos understood at the neighborhood level now has moved beyond a parochial concern.
“It is a crisis stage,” Daley said, ordering bureaucrats to put their heads together.
So far, the bureaucrats are confounded.
Several departments have pieces of the parking issue, but no single department has total control. The Department of Revenue does what it does best, increasing parking revenue to stave off increases in the property tax. The Planning Department works out parking problems with local developers. And the city’s zoning bureau shuffles more paper.
And aldermen, reacting to local constituent pressure, are pursuing parking policies that have a direct, and negative, impact on neighboring wards.
“We’re like a bunch of blind men feeling our way around the elephant,” sighed one beset city official. “And sooner or later, you step in some trouble.”
In the meantime, parking is the subject du jour in nearly every city neighborhood where there never seems to be enough of it or it costs too much.
And beyond its effect on the average person–who must pay for it legally, pay the tickets after parking illegally or wait for the penalties to pile up–the presence or absence of parking has come to influence the very lifestyle of those in the area.
Some suburban residents cite parking hassles among the reasons they don’t bother coming in for a night on the town or even for a simple cup of coffee and a sandwich after shopping.
“I can go to a movie and dinner at Woodfield Mall. Parking is free there,” said Charlene Porter, 27, a Rolling Meadows resident who had just plunked down $9 for a parking spot at Marina City on Thursday morning.
Rich Melman, owner of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, said he closed The Original A-1 restaurant Sept. 29 at the North Pier complex north of the Chicago River because of parking problems in the area.
“The customer does not want to spend $9 or $10 for lunch, and $12 for parking,” Melman said. “When we started hearing 20 or 30 complaints a week, we said, `Hey we’re just making people mad. Why would people want to come here?’ “
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In Lincoln Park, where the parking wars have taken on a Third World revolutionary flavor, residents with their own private garage spaces are demanding reserved street parking for their second cars, forcing business owners to close shop because patrons are scared away.
“It’s a madhouse,” said Ald. Mary Ann Smith, whose 48th Ward is 1 mile square but contains 87,000 people and their cars.
“The city wasn’t designed to be a suburb, where everyone could comfortably park two or three cars,” said Smith, who is conducting her own parking survey in the Uptown and Edgewater neighborhoods.
“What we need are more alternatives,” she said. “All we’re doing is pushing the parking problem across the city, block by block.”
To City Hall, automobiles are not transportation, but a herd of cash cows, generating more than $200 million each year in parking-ticket, vehicle-sticker and meter fees and gas taxes.
The city runs its own parking ticket courts and almost always wins in contested cases, according to city officials. That’s one reason the city has boosted its parking fine collection to more than $70 million a year from $20 million since 1989.
To boost revenues even more, the administration is changing the thousands of “No Parking” signs on side street corners to “No Parking Tow Zone” signs, allowing private companies to tow tens of thousands of illegally parked cars at $115 a shot.
The city’s cut of those fees will generate even more revenue, while adding to neighborhood parking anxiety.
The city charges residents $60 for a city sticker, but that does not carry with it any real privileges because the administration supports parking restrictions that drastically curtail available parking places.
Until Friday, Daley’s government had avoided studying the frenzy of residential permit parking, which has placed parking restrictions on 70 percent of North Side streets and hundreds of blocks on the South Side, from Bridgeport to Hyde Park.
Permit parking started in the late 1970s to preserve a parking space for the late Virginia West, a Northwest Side resident bedeviled by students parking on side streets at Northeastern Illinois University.
Civic groups and others warned that the government perk handed out by aldermen would become yet another entitlement, but the aldermen ignored the advice.
Over the past four years, the number of residential parking permits has grown exponentially.
At least 60,000 permits are expected to be issued this year, city officials say, and more the next, as aldermen are finding it impossible to meet the demands of residents and businesses.
The haphazard and inexorable policy has forced businesses to close their doors, pitting one block against another in the competition for a parking space, forcing residents to purchase guest passes for visitors or risk having the cars ticketed and towed.
Some senior City Hall officials have been privately kicking around a Draconian option: restricting the number of cars people can own in some high-density neighborhoods.
“You’d love to do it, it’s the right thing to do, but it would kill you politically,” said one high-ranking official.
To business owners, who may depend on customers nearby and those as far as 50 miles away, permit parking seems unconstitutional.
“I think it’s un-American,” said Annelies Panagoulias, manager of the Athenian Room, a restaurant in Lincoln Park. “The streets are for everybody. We all pay taxes. There should be a different solution.”
Panagoulias, like other business owners, said she has been losing customers since nearby streets got the “permit parking only” designation a few years ago.
Balancing the interests of people such as Panagoulias with the understandable demand by residents for a safe parking spot near home has been challenging city officials in Chicago and most other major cities for years.
Car ownership is up: There were 135 million privately owned vehicles registered in the country in 1995, compared with 106 million 20 years ago, according to the American Automobile Manufacturers Association.
Experts cite anecdotal evidence of each licensed driver in a family having a car, in contrast with the past custom of one car per family. And today’s urban dweller is more likely to have grown up in the suburbs and feel more dependent on the automobile than those who grew up in the city.
Marie Witmer, editor of Parking Professional magazine, said all major cities are grappling with the same parking problems and that, in most cases, problems are resolved with permit parking.
Parking officials in Chicago are concerned about a typical answer to residential parking permits–the black market sale of guest parking passes.
“We spotted that a few months ago in the River City area,” said John Holden, a city parking administrator. “Some trader at the Board of Trade was selling guest passes.”