Even bicyclists are angry about the mayor's parking meter deal - and not just because they can't fit their locks around the new pay boxes the way they could with the old meters.
It turns out, according to a new study, that the contract City Hall signed with Chicago Parking Meters LLC gives up control of what used to be known as the "public right-of-way."
"This limits any potential projects that use streets with metered spaces: bus rapid transit, bicycle lanes, street festivals, sidewalk expansion, streetscaping, pedestrian bulb-outs, loading zones, rush hour parking control, mid-block crossing, and temporary open spaces," the Active Transportation Alliance says. "The City’s ability to use streets in fresh, people-centric ways is now dictated, controlled and limited by the arrangements and penalties within the parking meters lease."
Has any contract the city has signed sucked more?
"Wait, we sold that off too?" the Reader wonders.
ATA policy director Arline Welty writes at Progress Illinois that "This severely restricts innovative planning for bicyclists, pedestrian, and transit users, even though many of those innovations are actually called for in the city’s own Bike 2015 Plan."
"The City lambasted the report in an e-mail response released late Tuesday afternoon by budget department spokesman Pete Scales, saying it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the parking meter lease deal and the law of public right of way," A Couple Things reports. "It also chastised the ATA for not reaching out to the city before publishing the report."
That's a laugh. The city did the whole deal in secret to begin with - and failed to reach out to all interested and affected parties.
And as Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd) has already found out, any authority the city tries to assert over the streets that could potentially alter Chicago Parking Meters LLC's revenue stream carries a penalty that the city must pay to the private company to make up the difference.
"The reason why this is so important to us," an ATA spokesperson said, "is that we want to see our streets be safe for pedestrians, be safe for cyclists with innovative street designs. This deal limits and at its most extreme penalizes these designs."
At this point, ATA has more credibility than City Hall. What's worse is that the mayor signed a 75-year lease and we still don't seem to know what's in it and what it's ramifications really are. That's a fail.
Steve Rhodes is the proprietor of The Beachwood Reporter, a Chicago-centric news and culture review.
