Parking Meters Boxes Installed Where Drivers Never Park

By Chuck Sudo in News on Aug 11, 2011 1:30PM

Paul Saini Photography

As part of the parking meter privatization deal Chicago Parking Meters, LLC was required to replace all the city's meters with those monolithic multispace electronic fareboxes. CPM finally replaced the final 72 a few weeks back in an area bounded by Ashland and Damen from east to west, 13th to 15th Streets north and south.

As our friends at The Expired Meter discovered, that's an area of the city where CPM will likely never see a return on the investment because motorists rarely ever park there.

To prove the theory, TEM chose three random pay boxes and conducted an experiment.

In each, a quarter was deposited and a meter receipt was generated. Since the units had just been installed, each receipt displayed a very low number. The number 003 was listed on two of the receipts and 005 on a third. The assumption was the previous few transactions were test prints made by the technician(s) who installed the units.

Over five weeks later, we returned and repeated the quarter plunking process on the same three machines.

Incredibly, what all three receipts showed was not one other driver had paid for parking at all three meters in the subsequent five weeks.

They estimate if those 72 pay boxes brought in $1.50 a week, the parking meter lease would be over before the meters made a return on their investment. That area of Pilsen isn't the only area where CPM was required to install fare boxes. The article also includes a photo of a farebox in a desolate area of Roseland, and vacant lots on the west side have also had city meters replaced with fare boxes.