Report: meter lease limits n'hoods, planners, city

06/25/2009 3:21 PM

By Micah Maidenberg
Editor

No Comments - Add Your Comment


Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

The Active Transportation Alliance's new report, "Unrealized Assets: How leasing control of parking meters limits the future of active transport and innovative urban planning" claims the parking meter lease means neighborhoods and planners have "have lost control over one of their most powerful urban planning and revenue generating tools."
The parking meter leased passed city council last December 40-5. Loop and Near Loop aldermen like Robert Fioretti, Pat Dowell, Walter Burnett and Brendan Reilly all supported the deal.
ATA is a Chicago-based organization that promotes biking, walking and public transit as alternatives to using a car to get around, and has a goal of creating a region where 50 percent of all trips are made by biking, walking or public transit.
The group isn't against raising the cost of parking meters. In fact, valuing on-street parking appropriately, according to ATA, is a crucial tool for creating a safer and more environmentally friendly city:

Underpriced curb parking is a hidden source of traffic congestion and stimulates the most inefficient form of urban transportation. Underpriced parking encourages drivers to cruise for cheap parking, which harms everyone’s health and safety, slows down automobiles and buses behind the cruiser, and provides little benefit to the cruiser. It is a danger to bicyclists and pedestrians because cruisers focus on finding the right spot, not on whether a pedestrian is crossing the street.

But leasing the meters to Chicago Parking Meters LLC (CPM), which has indeed raised meter rates, wasn't the right answer, the report says.
While noting the city still has control over meter rates, locations and hours of operation, the "city would have to pay CPM the revenue that they would receive if a car were parked in the space for 24 hours a day in the central business district."
"The overarching impact is that the City has essentially given up control over pricing of the meters and placement of the meters," the report says. The result:

This means that every potential project on a street with meters, including bus rapid transit, bicycle lanes, sidewalk expansion, streetscaping, pedestrian bulb-outs, loading zones, rush hour parking control, mid-block crossing, and temporary open spaces are dictated, controlled and limited by parking meters. These restrictions severely limit innovative planning for bicyclists, pedestrian and transit users.

Here's what happened to Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd), as first reported in the Chicago Reader, when he wanted to change the times on a series of meters in Bucktown:

When Ald. Waguespack asked to revert the hours of meter enforcement for 270 meters in his ward to what they had been before the lease – from 8 AM-9 PM seven days a week back to 9 AM – 6 PM Monday through Saturday - the city said the move was legally permissible but would cost the city $608,753 over the period of three years. So while the city technically retains control over these spaces, any move to remove or adjust parking will financially penalize the City.

ATA's conclusion:

[I]ncreased meter rates may reduce vehicle miles traveled and result in positive effects on curbside turnover, but the rates do not have built-in flexibility to reflect market needs, nor do increased rates fund local improvements, like better bus service or bicycle parking.

Download the new report here.


No Comments - Add Your Comment