Say Goodbye To Parking On Logan Square's Boulevards, Unless You're There For Church
By Mae Rice in News on Feb 4, 2016 6:58PM
Starting Wednesday morning, workers from the Chicago Department of Transportation began removing the signs that allowed for free parking along the four-lane main drags of Logan and Kedzie Boulevards during select hours.
Churchgoers will still be able to park along those stretches during services, though, according to Paul Sajovec, a spokesperson for Ald. Scott Waguespack’s office—there just won't be any signage about it.
The parking signs are coming down, specifically, on Logan Boulevard between Western Ave. and Logan Square, and on Kedzie Boulevard between Logan Square and Palmer Square, Sajove said. (Parking was, and remains, permitted on the service roads that run in front of the boulevard’s homes.)
“The idea... is not to prevent churches from being able to park on the Boulevard as they have for decades,” Sajovec told Chicagoist. Instead, Ald. Waguespack's team hopes that once the signs are gone, Logan Square can return to “the [parking] process that was in place before the signs being installed.”
That is, an unofficial process in which churchgoers can park on the boulevards during services, Sajovec explained. In exchange for this extralegal privilege for their congregations, churches “place cones out” and have volunteers make sure everyone park in an orderly fashion, and leave promptly after the services.
Because church-goers park and leave basically all together, Sajovec added, it minimizes two problems: the problem of random stragglers parking on the boulevards and leaving their cars there beyond the permitted parking hours, and the more serious problem of drivers hitting lone parked cars because “normally, [a boulevard lane is] a travel lane, not a parking lane.”
The parking signs first went up along the boulevards in 2011, when the boulevard segments in question fell in the 35th ward. That ward’s then-alderman, Rey Colon, passed a City Council ordinance legalizing free boulevard parking during certain hours “without any public review,” the Tribune reported.
Back then, residents were worried about losing the boulevards’ “feeling of airiness” to gridlock and traffic hazards, the Tribune reported. Their feelings don't seem to have changed much since: Sajovec said that a recent local referendum on removing the boulevard parking signs, pushed for by Logan Square Preservation, passed with flying colors.
Based on that referendum and conversations with the churches, Waguespack submitted an ordinance that allowed for the parking signs’ removal in July of 2015, Sajovec said.