There has been a lot of discussion and coverage about the city's sale of our parking meters to a private corporation for $1.2 billion. The effects of this are starting to boil over and people are angry. A fellow Slooper and host of the blog American Crow recently reached out to us about some correspondence with 3rd ward Alderman, Pat Dowell about the parking issues. They bring up some valid and important issues that need to be addressed.Carol Marin, a blogger for the Chicago Sun-Times also weighs in on the issue:
A teacher who lives in the South Loop along Printer's Row wrote, "Now I have to wake up at 7:30 on Sunday so that I can move my car. Many of the businesses in my area are not even open on Sundays. My street is like a ghost town. It's lost its vibrancy. . . . "The Printer's Row teacher brings up a valid point about the neighborhoods loss of vibrancy. We assume the teacher is implying that the parking meters are deterring people from parking and coming to the neighborhood. If that's the case it would be interesting to hear about how businesses are coping with this lack of 'traffic'.
However, there is a silver lining in our opinion, but we need to think long term.
By increasing the cost to use parking meters it inherently will force people to weigh the benefits of driving downtown. Hopefully it will deter people from this action which in turn could ease congestion and possibly encourage them to use other forms of transportation (CTA, Metra, Bikes, walking). As we heard throughout the presidential campaign, we need to ween people off their dependency of cars and foreign oil.
This brings to mind an old theory about a "gas tax" that would encourage US consumers to be less dependant on gas and cars. Thomas Friedman, the renowned NYT columnist, is a big proponent of this theory and discussed it in this column from 2005:
...with a higher gasoline tax locked in for good, pump prices would never be going back to the old days, adds Mr. Verleger, so they (US consumers) would have a much stronger incentive to switch to more fuel-efficient vehicles and Detroit would have had to make more hybrids to survive. This would have put Detroit five years ahead of where it is now.Another similar theory or concept that has been considered in Chicago is a congestion tax for drivers entering the loop or business district during peak times. London has had this scheme in place since 2003 and overall the impact has been successful (depending on who you ask).
All three of these controversial theories or actions (higher cost to use parking meters, a gas tax or a congestion tax) have one thing in common and that is the ability to make people reconsider their transportation choices. It will affect some of us more then others, but gradually we will adapt and at the end of the day, we think that's a good thing.
Would love to hear your thoughts as it's obviously a controversial subject. What do you think?