Parking Ticket Revenues in Chicago
Earlier this year, a friend of mine parked her car at a meter in downtown Chicago. Unfortunately, she didn't notice that the meter was in a no-parking-during-rush-hour zone, and while she was away from her car, morning rush hour came and went. When she returned a few minutes too late to feed the meter, she noticed a shiny new ticket attached to her window and, thinking it was for the expired meter, figured there was no longer much point in filling the meter and went back about her business. When she returned again, she found another ticket – this time actually for the expired meter.
Modern highwaymen give receipts.
Now here's the interesting part: both tickets were issued by the same officer, from the same ticket pad. Each ticket on a pad has (I assume) a monotonically decreasing ticket number printed on it. Each ticket is timestamped. The tickets were for $60 and $50, respectively – and the most common offenses and fine amounts are conveniently displayed on each ticket. Some fines are significantly more than $50-60, but I'd bet a lot more $50-60 tickets are given out than $200 ones. So let's call the average fine amount $55. We have here a perfect opportunity to use simple math combined with liberal assumptions to speculate wildly – one of my favorite hobbies!
For privacy reasons, I've masked out the license plate on each ticket, along with most of the digits of the ticket numbers (which could have been used to look up the license plate from the Chicago Department of Revenue's web site). But I've left in the digits of the ticket numbers that actually differ between the two tickets – the leading several digits were the same on each ticket. So – between 8:49 AM and 11:03 AM, this particular officer handed out 45 tickets, doing an average of about $55 worth of damage each.
Do the math: On a January morning earlier this year, a single meter maid was raking in over $1100 an hour for the City of Chicago. The city can and does legally mug its citizens to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars every hour of every day – and is still projected to have a budget deficit of (at the low end of the available estimates) over $200 million in 2010, even after budget cuts, furloughs, and selling out Chicago's parking meter rights for the next 75 years for over a billion dollars. You can draw a lot of different possible conclusions from these facts, none of them very flattering toward Mayor Daley or any of the other folks who run the City of Chicago – to put it mildly.
On a completely unrelated note, according to the 2010 City of Chicago Budget, Booters (the pleasant people who have decided to spend most of their days ruining the days of others, professionally) earn $29.60 per hour. If you assume each booter works a few hours less per year than the average for employed people in the United States – say about 1800 hours per year – that means that Chicago booters earn more than CPS teachers with a Masters degree. Differences in benefits and retirement packages almost surely put teachers ahead in compensation, overall, but the fact remains that in Chicago, being a high school drop-out and professional asshole pays nearly as well as going into debt to earn two college degrees and dedicating your life to doing right by children and ceaselessly working for social justice.
Why am I not surprised?
