The recent City Council debate has concentrated on the plight of poor people whose cars get towed. But the two wards where cars get towed the most are the 42nd and the 2nd–two wealthy districts that run along the lakefront, from the Gold Coast to the near south side. I know this because Merlin Tripp, the computer expert who helped me with my recent property-tax stories, did a computer analysis of the latest raw data on towing the city keeps on its Web site. Coming in a distant second to the 42nd and 2nd–but still well ahead of the rest of the lakefront and the outlying northwest and southwest wards–are several of the city’s poorest wards, on the west and south sides. Towing seems to be one of the rare city services that treats the rich and the poor almost the same.
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Natarus says towing is a major public service, because it clears the streets so traffic can flow. “If we let cars pile up it would be gridlock,” he says. “You’d be surprised where people leave their cars because they don’t want to put them in a garage. They leave them in vacant lots. They leave them in alleys. They double-park them. They put them in bus lanes.”
Under Daley, booting and towing is as much about raising money as it is about clearing the streets. If you’re booted you have 24 hours to pay the $150 booting fee and your tickets. If you don’t pay your car gets towed. If it’s towed the city adds a $150 towing fee to your booting fee and tickets. If you don’t pick up your car within 24 hours you get hit with a storage fee. “It’s hardest on poor people, because they don’t have the cash or credit cards to pay off that boot,” says Shirley Coleman, alderman of the 16th Ward, who’s been pushing for relief for poor residents since 1997.
Still, you’ve got to hand it to Daley–no other mayor, not even his father, ever raised so much money from towing and ticketing. In 2003 all these fees and fines added $140.6 million to the city’s treasury. “He should just come out and call it what it is–a tax on driving,” jokes the aldermanic aide. “He can say he’s fighting pollution by making it too expensive to drive.” (Of course if Daley wanted to fight pollution he’d also have to rescind the CTA service cuts and fare hikes and expand the schedule, but that’s another story.)
Maybe. But when I called the city’s parking-ticket hotline an operator told me with a chuckle, “We’re not going to ignore your debt just because you walk away from your car. We will take you to court. We can garnish your wages. Eventually you will have to pay.”
The janitor told me that he tries to feed expired meters as a courtesy to strangers, but he has to be careful–it’s against the law to feed someone else’s meter. The janitor said revenue agents have threatened to call the police if they see him doing it.
