The following letters came in before the village board made changes to the meter increases:
Why do businesses relocate from Oak Park to Forest Park? Why are the parking lots around Marion Street half empty? Why do the merchants have to listen to their customers’ agitated comments about the parking meters outside? Because our village does not understand the basics of consumer behavior.
The basic model of consumer decision-making starts with problem recognition, which occurs when there is a difference between one’s desired state and one’s actual state.
On a Friday, I drove to my regular lot on my way to the Metra station. I put $.25 in the meter for each hour my car was parked in the lot-$2.50 for the day. On Monday, I returned to the lot and thought my meter was broken because it wasn’t registering the time. It took a minute for me to realize that I would have to put in six quarters per hour or 60 quarters for the day to park in the lot. The price increased 1,400 percent from $2.50 to $15 for the day. I recognized a problem.
It is now cheaper for me to drive downtown than pay $15 for parking + $4 for the train. I made a change-that change does not benefit Oak Park. When I do take the train, I go to Galewood and catch the train at the Mars station. Plenty of free parking.
I no longer stop at Marion Street Cheese Market or Prairie Bread Kitchen on my way to or from the train. I don’t check out Bottega M to see what’s new or drop by Fitzgerald’s Fine Stationery to pick up a card. I don’t order Sushi at the Sushi House for take out.
Now, will the Village of Oak Park recognize that we have a problem and change the parking meter structure? If not, village residents will change their behavior as I have, and it will be very difficult to change things back. I don’t know what supported the decision to raise prices so dramatically. I suspect the comparative set was incorrect. Comparing downtown Oak Park to downtown Chicago is not appropriate. Comparing parking cost for a quick shopping trip to parking for a commuter lot is not appropriate.
I urge my fellow Oak Park residents to write to villageboard@oak-park.us and voice your outrage. Show up at the village board meetings and demand that this issue be addressed. This is our village. These decisions are made on our behalf. We cannot allow this bad decision to stand. It will cost us all in the end.
Maura O’Hara
Oak Park
Here’s an idea on fiscal responsibility in Oak.Park that could save the village money. It has to do with the parking meter controversy that seems to be getting worse each time the village tries to solve it. How about getting rid of all parking meters. How would this save money? Well, we wouldn’t need “studies” and perhaps wouldn’t need to hire a full-time parking manager. We might then begin to bring back not only shoppers from outside the village but patrons within Oak Park. Public trust might be resurrected again. (Raising parking violations to $20 doesn’t seem to be a good, sensitive way to help our businesses.)
Needs and demographics are different, I understand, but why not look seriously to business successes in communities like Forest Park as well as LaGrange (which has many free parking areas as well as a free parking garage). Businesses there seem to be thriving and doing well.
Maybe we need to humbly look for simple, easy solutions instead of masterful large interventions that just don’t seem to work well. Just a thought.
Carole Albores
We enjoyed Dan Haley’s (and his wife’s) comments on Oak Park’s new extortionary parking meters. [You think $1.50 an hour is a little steep, do you? News, Sept. 10]
However, a larger issue needs to be considered. Oak Park has done an abysmal job of attracting and retaining businesses. How many (like Centuries and Sleuths) have moved from Oak Park to the thriving Forest Park, mainly in search of lower taxes? But it is not only the misguided property taxes that drive businesses away. It is the attitude of encouraging shoppers (Forest Park) vs. hassling shoppers and squeezing cash out of them at every opportunity (Oak Park).
Making the business district user-friendly is a goal Oak Park never seems to have considered. Just compare the experience of shopping in Forest Park to that in Oak Park. In Forest Park, traffic is slowed by the enforced crosswalks that have actual signs in the street (no other form of crosswalk gets any respect from cars in the Chicago area). Forest Park drivers actually stop for pedestrians! True, Oak Park finally installed one real crosswalk on Oak Park Avenue, replete with speedbump and sign. But for the most part, the pedestrian is engaged in constant warfare with cars. Another quality-of-shopping aspect is the empty storefronts. Oak Park seems to evict taxpaying tenants without any clear plan (e.g., Val’s halla and Thyme & Honey), and then leave the buildings vacant for decades. Oak Park refuses to allow Harley Davidson to install a store and hassles Lane Bryant-why?
In Forest Park, parking in the street right in front of the stores is free. In Oak Park, you have the choice between obscenely expensive parking meters or the mysterious meterless, but not free, parking spaces that require you to hike to a secret location to pay for what you hope is the right parking space. (I admit we have never even tried to master these Satanic devices.) Even for those for whom cost is no object, expensive parking requires you to keep a huge mass of quarters on hand. If you do not have enough quarters, or are unwilling to commit to more than a few quarters worth of parking, you will rush through the shops, grabbing the one essential item you really need, and neglect to linger and browse for that impulse purchase that the shop owners would dearly love you to make.
You certainly will not decide on the spur of the moment to stop in to grab some sushi-that would mean hiking back to the meter, and maybe haggling with a shopkeeper for quarters. So you skip the sushi, you skip the book you saw in the window, you skip the voluptuous olfactory experience of Penzey’s, and you head for Forest Park where you can shop at your leisure.
We like Oak Park shops and want to support them, but convenience and cost are real factors.
Tom & Carolyn DeCoursey
Oak Park
Dear members of the board:
With new parking rates that are unequaled in any suburb and 99.9% of Chicago, the recent changes in Oak Park parking policy represent both an “unwelcome” to everyone in the village and a potential death threat to Oak Park businesses.
Fiscal responsibility is essential, but endangering the whole business community is neither good government nor an appropriate way to balance the budget.
Listen to comments-and please quickly consider a thorough reassessment/revision as soon as possible.
Roy and Nancy Hlavacek
Oak Park
I don’t like these new rules, but they are obviously necessary and should not be repealed. The whole point of these rules was to make parking enforcement self-sufficient. At this time, when the village is dancing on a budgetary razor edge, we can’t afford to let parking become a burden again. (I mean that literally; it’s not an ideological “afford.” We don’t have the money to subsidize parking enforcement. Ask again in about a decade, if we’re lucky.)
We (in the form of our elected representatives on the village board) have wasted money needlessly time and time again, and now we have to deal with the results-results which take the form of higher parking rates and property taxes. Don’t like it? Tough.
It’s a partisan comment, and therefore by current conventional wisdom ugly, no matter how true it is, but the only village trustee in the last three village boards who consistently stood against big unnecessary spending was Robert Milstein, and the voters turned him down for village president, and didn’t support his party (the VCA) in large enough numbers to put even one of them in office in the last election. We’ve got a VMA majority until 2011 whether we like it or not, and this is the route the VMA has consistently chosen to take. The people have spoken; if they don’t like the results of their speaking, then perhaps they can say something different next time. In the meantime, they’ve got to put up with the echoes saying “I told you so.”
I know that if Ray Johnson, who occasionally posts on these boards, sees this comment, he will come in and claim the village board didn’t intend for any of this to happen and disavow responsibility for the mess because he always does when things go wrong. But is it really better to claim that the village board didn’t notice the economic downturn since 2000 or realize that continued spending would require an increase in revenues? I’m not sure that well-meaning incompetence is any more comforting in an elected official than malignity is when you get right down to it.
Instead of whining, I suggest a different approach. The next time you’re putting extra money into a parking meter, or paying off a parking ticket you got because you forgot that Saturdays aren’t free anymore, don’t get annoyed. Instead, take pride in your contribution to the smooth running of village government. The price of freedom may be eternal vigilance, but the price of democracy in Oak Park is a great big pile of those orange parking ticket envelopes and a surprisingly large number of those shiny, shiny quarters.
John Franklin