Now, ideally the meters would have been run correctly with municipal ownership, but that was apparently not within their capabilities.
Before the deal we had 20-year-old meters which were generally 25 cents or 50 cents per hour (quarters only). Lakefront parking was generally free outside downtown.
After the deal, rates quadrupled or more and many more meters went up, including at the lakefront. Now there is always a worry about whether you're paid up enough to finish a picnic. At least we can pay with credit/debit cards through an app (progress!).
The deal was a con from the beginning to help fill a budget shortfall and every resident who drives felt the effects, and will for the rest of their lives.
So instead they "sell" the parking revenue to a "private" operator who then raises the price. The service provided by the metering company is not just operating the meters but also taking the blame for the cost of parking. This way the city government — i.e. the people in the city government — get to throw up their hands and point at their predecessors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem
The incentive structure affecting the politicians is the root cause.
No contractual, perpetual hostage holding.
It would require an act of Congress+, so I don’t see this ever happening.
Higher parking rates means fewer people driving, which is a long-term win. I highly doubt this was the top priority for the people who set the Chicago parking rates, but it's actually a good thing for the city.
Yes, you can argue "it just means parking is for rich people" -- to which I'd respond "keep increasing the parking rates, along with some other tactics, and even rich people will turn to other means of transportation."
Here in Amsterdam, the city government is deliberately doing things like raising parking rates, closing streets to car traffic and removing street parking -- all in an effort to reduce car usage.
Only if they have decent alternatives.
https://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/6/ctamap_Lsystem.png
If you're on the NW or SW sides in particular, you're going to need a car.
We're getting more and more bike lanes but they're also very unequally distributed and biking is...not great for winter.
I think a lot of Euros misunderestimate (to quote Dubya) how much more extreme North American city climates are. Using wikipedia data, Amsterdam's lowest mean temperature month is January at 3.8C, and highest mean temperature month is July at 18.1C. Chicago has 3 months below 3.8C per year, in fact it's below 0C for 3 months. Plus 4 months above 18.1C. Some of our climates just aren't terribly comfortable for biking here. NYC is not much better either.
I think the bigger issues here are (1) a regulatory environment that heavily disfavors mass transit, and (2) a suburban (and, increasingly, urban) culture that prefers isolation to the risk of "undesirables" brought into their neighborhoods by mass transit.
As a small example of this: DC's metro was conceived a little over 50 years ago, and opened its first line about 47 years ago[1]. It's still expanding, and yet many of its stations are inconveniently placed because the communities it served didn't want DC's plurality black population entering their segregated suburbs[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metropolitan_Area_T...
[2]: https://ggwash.org/view/98/racial-politics-kept-college-park...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metropolitan_Area_T...
That's not to dismiss the value of local advocacy but merely to highlight the careful balancing act performed by government to maintain favor in eyes of its constituents. The fundamental tension between the People and the Government should err toward the People, as long as you place stock in a government "of the people, by the people, for the people."
This is why I am not a fan of congestion pricing even though I want a more transit oriented US. The US across the board gets less transit for its money than the rest of the world. Until we get costs under control it’s hard to imagine our cities building enough of the right kind of transit.
Chicago in particular was frustrating as a tourist as I found pretty much any trip not involving the loop to be tedious and lengthy.
Which seems like all that will do is make life even more miserable in hopes of.. then forcing transit to be built?
Congestion pricing in NYC is a convoluted mess with perverse incentives because even the anti-car lobbyists are not actually our friends.
The plan as it stands will actually penalize private car drivers while allowing ubers/lyfts/taxis to enter/exit the congestion zone unlimited times per day for 1 toll fee. Given that Manhattan 9-5 weekday traffic is largely for hire vehicles, this is completely screwed up.
Transportation Alternatives for example, lists 2 of its biggest donors being Lyft & an automated toll/ticketing tech company, lol.
Would more be better? Sure. But this is a city where many trips can already be as fast or faster via transit than driving, depending on how difficult parking is and how far your "last mile" is.
The big thing that sucks for Chicago is that this shit deal makes it expensive to remove existing street parking and use the space for other things.
Decreases in availability/access and/or increases in cost of private vehicle use, without offsetting improvements in transit are not a good thing.
Communities living in cities also need traffic calmed, quieter places nearby. Banning cars here is often a good first step and reuse the street with cafes, restaurants and transportation by bike, public transport and cars only if parked somewhere else.
Yes, the car culture of Amsterdam, in one of the most densely populated counties on the planet, surely should be the car culture of a country with endless tracts of land.
Voters (the important part of a democracy, you see) want to drive in the US. Therefore, there should be no attempts to thwart people in that goal.
And to speak to that, Amsterdam has ample places to bike, a strong bike culture, paths, public transportation. It makes sense to remove unused parking spaces, and Amsterdam already has loads of places you cannot drive.
This is not Chicago. Suggesting people remove parking spaces before providing strong, complete, full alternatives, such as extensive piblic transport, and alternatives to cars, should be criminal.
It's the wrong way to approach the problem.
So I would say that usually it's about providing incentives to use public transit and reduce the incentives to drive, but sometimes it's purely about reducing traffic.
The poster also said that he's a former chicago resident (in his bio it says he's actually from chicago), so he exactly knows what he's talking about.
That's a logical fallacy.
So I would say that usually it's about providing incentives to use public transit and reduce the incentives to drive, but sometimes it's purely about reducing traffic
It should never be about either of these. Instead, provide public transportation people want to use. Carrot, never stick.
No it's not? It gives him credibility. You can not lecture someone about the car culture in an area they've lived in. He has literally lived there and in his case, as I understood it, even grown up there. It seems like you are suggesting he only knows amsterdam and does not get that chicago is different.
> It should never be about either of these. Instead, provide public transportation people want to use. Carrot, never stick.
This really ignores the effects of car traffic on the communities. Reducing traffic is a valid goal and sometimes the really only goal. It might be because of and unacceptable level of noise, or pollution or something else like an increase in safety for people on foot. Then the current amount of traffic is just not acceptable, you might not care that much if they end up not taking the trip, switching to public transit or driving somewhere else because your only goal was the reduction of car traffic in a specific area. A good example is barcelonas superblock concept, where you minimise through-traffic through specific blocks to enable more walkable, bikeable and livable neighbourhoods for the inhabitants of these urban neighbourhoods. Within reasonable bounds, neighbourhoods should have the ability to limit excessive car traffic in the area they are living in.
In the center of Copenhagen parking during the daytime is $6/hour!
I suppose it still is, compared to $6/hour.
In much of Europe, rather than cheap 50¢/hr or whatever parking, it's more common to have no fee but still a time limit. (Or, in city centres, a high fee and a time limit.)
It's a merger of corporation and state, which is somethig Sorel advocated.
Absolute Kafkaesque urban planning.
The primary reason the parking deal never goes away is that it allows the city to blame "investors" for doing something it was already wants to do (keep lots of street parking).
Ok but as an urban planner it's a whole lot easier to tell your boss "hey we're removing 5 parking, spaces we'll lose x dollars per year in parking fees" than it is to say "hey we're removing 5 parking spaces and we need to come up with $5 million to pay the parking company"
Or broken windows at the company' C level suites houses?
The "answer" here is either to suck it up (which will happen) or, if you allow room for it, it starts with little acts of violence and ends with effective change or full blown riots
Just to clarify - I'm not advocating for anything like that. I'm just saying - try to picture the people from Paris in this situation and tell me what would happen (and if the contract would stand)
The courts absolutely fold versus popular pressure
Why? Is "parking" limited to cars? The city can apply the meters to bicycle/scooter/ebike/skateboard parking. Once upon a time many bicycles were regulated and some even required license plates. Chicago seems free to switch people other modes of transport and simply continue the parking fee system accordingly.
This makes complete sense though. The company and the city signed a deal for X amount of meters for Y amount of years. That no doubt went into the financial planning for Profit/Loss. If the city were to remove meters they would be breaking the contract as there are no longer X meters and that much less revenue that the company paid upfront for.
But it sounds like 75 years was what Mayor Daley needed to make up the budget shortfall that year, so Chicago is stuck.
What people miss about privatization is that deliberate defunding and deliberate enshittification are always the first and second steps.
Then the private sector "rescues" you from the deliberately engineered incompetence of the public sector while taking a fat, fat cut.
It's the same reason why I'm struggling to see a doctor in the UK right now (the tories want US style healthcare profit margins). Or why the USPS has to fund pensions for yet to be born employees.
Looking at parking like a profit center is perverse, and treating it that way creates perverse incentives.
> The point of parking meters and tickets is not to make money.
According to whom? Is it equitable because all citizens have the same amount of money?
You took a word I said out of context and asked me something unrelated to my point. That's trolling behavior.
An equitable system would involve each citizen receiving an equal number of parking tokens annually.
(This comment is not serious, btw.)
What is it about parking that makes it harder than toll roads? Is it that parking is muni rather than govt-chartered enterprise?
You can't easily take a picture of the license plate of every car parked on every single parking spot in a city.
Alerting street-side towing for unauthorized parking seems to be well-incentivized activity.
I had to delete a few versions of this comment because I got dizzy with anger.
What is wrong with people thinking government should make net profit on fees from every individual service?
Perhaps transit and parking charge nominal fees to ensure the users of said services aren't abusing a limited resource. But the cost of operating city services should ultimately come from taxes.
A city should not have the profit expectations of a publicly traded company.
And presumably denied access to anything you don't pay for.
There's more than one sci-fi story including that premise