Parking Garage Rates Up Only $1 A Day, Survey Says

Still reeling from the spike in parking meter fees and where that money's going? Rest assured, the price to park in a Chicago garage daily is up only $1 from last year, according to a new parking rate survey released this week.

The median price to park in a Chicago parking garage is $31 a day, up just 3.3 percent from last year, according to Colliers International, a real estate services firm that conducted the annual parking rate survey.

Chicago ranks fourth among U.S. cities for the highest daily parking garage rates behind New York, Honolulu and Boston. Globally, Chicago ranked the 25th most expensive city to park in a garage daily.

At a median price of $325 -- up 4.8 percent from last year's $310 -- Chicago also ranked the fourth most expensive city in the U.S. to park monthly behind New York, Boston and San Francisco.

The survey showed that parking garage rates across the U.S. have held relatively stable despite the recession, with an average increase in parking prices of 18 cents a day, and a surprising decrease of $1.47 to park monthly.

This year's 75-cent increase in Chicago's parking tax -- the seventh such increase in the last 12 years -- accounted for some of the change in Chicago garage rates, according to the city's Parking Industry Labor Management Committee.

Because little time has passed since the start of the whole meter debacle and it's still cheaper to use meters in the Loop for short-term parking, it's too soon to tell if people are switching to garages from meters downtown, the committee said. [S-T]