What sucks the most about having to hunt down a paybox on a Sunday and surrender your credit card to it (or punching up a prepaid mobile app) is the hideous specter it’ll summon of Mayor Richard M. Daley and his infamous parking privatization deal of 2008 (extensively covered in the Reader by Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke).
Rahm Emanuel, running to succeed Daley, promised to remedy this disaster, but then a weird thing happened: when activists challenged it in court, Mayor Emanuel’s city lawyers wound up arguing in the lease’s defense. The only change Emanuel made was a 2013 amendment that extended meter hours, provided free Sunday parking at neighborhood meters, and had the unfortunate likely side effect of making any further legal challenges unlikely. A year later, the City Council reinstated Sunday fees on major neighborhood streets, after business owners complained that a lack of turnover in parking spots was making it hard for Sunday customers to get to them. v
