SOUTH LOOP — Lately I’ve been wearing one of those hi-tech rubber bracelets that count how many steps you take (or don’t take) to inspire an active lifestyle through guilt.
I can’t say it works for everyone, or even me. One thing is certain, though: All the personal data collected by my Fitbit — number of stairs climbed and calories burned, for instance — creeps into everyday chitchat.
In certain circles, “How many steps ya got, today?” is the new “How you doin’, pal?”
My obsessive focus on daily step-count often made me wonder how far folks who spend their day walking — the mail lady, meter maid and beat cops — travel every day.
On a recent sunny afternoon, after parking the Chevy while on my way to negate all the steps I had taken by eating at Aurelio’s Pizza Downtown, I stopped the meter maid — er, parking enforcement aide — to ask if she kept track of how far she walks on a regular shift.
“No, but I should,” she said with a smile as we stood next to my car about 4:16 p.m., moments after I fed the electronic parking app $6 for three hours.
“I bet you take so many steps you could eat pizza every day,” I said.
The meter maid said I’d lose that bet — and we shared a laugh.
“Well, then you must be able to drink beer every day,” I said, my mind on the frosty bottle of Three Floyds’ Alpha King I planned to order with my pizza pie.
For some reason, she didn’t like that line.
“You don’t know me,” she said angrily.
“I know you. I know everybody,” I said with a chuckle. “It’s Friday, everybody likes beer on Friday.”
Then my pal and I walked away. I’ll admit it was an awkward goodbye and not my best banter with a stranger.
Mark Konkol says deciding on pizza was just the start of his problems:
But I didn’t think much of it, and I headed off to devour some pizza and suck down a cold one.
When we got back to the car, I discovered the meter maid left me a present — a pretty orange envelope stuffed with a $50 ticket jammed under the windshield wiper.
The note on the ticket said, “receipt expired & no mobile payment, no motorist,” signed by the parking enforcement officer at 4:19 p.m., three minutes after our chat.
“All [expletive] lies!” I cried out.
A portion of the parking ticket received by Mark Konkol on July 10. [DNAinfo/Mark Konkol]
There was no receipt to expire because I made a mobile payment.
And the meter maid indeed talked to the motorist — that would be me — right in front of his vehicle.
I quickly snatched a screen grab on my phone that showed 45 minutes left on the electronic meter as evidence and vowed to fight the vindictive injustice.
After my parking ticket rage subsided, I knew I couldn’t be alone.
Certainly others have suffered the hassle of meter maids using their ticket-wielding power to unfairly stick it to the street parking public.
A call to City Hall revealed this cold, hard truth: Chicago meter maids work on the honor system and have power to issue tickets at smart-meters even when you’ve paid electronically.
And that’s because they use one device to check electronic meter payments and a separate device to write tickets.
There’s no electronic safeguard preventing a parking enforcement aide from writing a ticket even if drivers pay via the parking app.
“In theory that could occur,” finance department spokeswoman Molly Poppe said. “Obviously that’s something we try to monitor and hope doesn’t happen. We don’t want any tickets that should not be written.”
It’s impossible to tell exactly how often meter-paying parkers get hit with bogus tickets. A city spokeswoman said computer glitches and coincidence — a parking enforcement aide checks your plate at the exact time you make a payment, for instance — might be to blame for some voided tickets.
And common sense says some parkers either miss the window to appeal the fine or just pay it and move on.
Still, there were 871 expired meter violation tickets voided by the city between June 2012 and June 30, 2015, according to city finance department data. Nearly 40 percent of those voided tickets were issued in the central business district — from Lake Michigan to Halsted Street between Roosevelt Road and North Avenue.
Poppe said the 871 voided tickets amount to less than 1/10 of a percent “error rate” of the 1.3 million parking tickets issued during the same two-year period. The math is right but I’d (successfully) argue the calculation only shows how many times those “errors” get caught.
According to city regulations, meter maids are trained to follow a very specific protocol before writing a ticket:
• Check the windshield for a valid parking receipt.
• Look for a motorist near the vehicle or parking payment station.
• Search the mobile meter system for the vehicle’s license plate number to confirm payment.
• Double-check the license plate number.
And before ticket-writers are allowed out the street, they sign a document saying they’ll abide by those rules.
City parking enforcement supervisors check for patterns of “errors” made by tracking voided tickets or fines caused by individual ticket-writers, Poppe said.
After they looked into my ticket they immediately voided the $50 fine and discussed the matter with the lady who wrote the ticket.
The meter maid told a supervisor she “didn’t recall” talking with me next to my car before writing the voided ticket, Poppe said.
Ultimately, the finance department came up with this excuse: “They believe the parking enforcement aide and you were transacting at the same time, and when she checked for mobile payment, your payment hadn’t finished and registered yet. So your payment and the ticket registered at the same time.”
While that’s nice theory, it's not at all how things happened.
Later, Poppe clarified things by saying parking ticket supervisors “believe” that simultaneous paying/ticket writing may have occurred … but ultimately they “did not identify a glitch in the system.”
Well, the glitch is pretty clear to me.
Chicago’s high-tech parking meter system has plenty of room for human error — and potential abuse — because it isn’t electronically connected to the device used to issue tickets as a way to protect parkers from getting their pockets unfairly picked.
Poppe said people who believe they got ticketed unfairly can call 312-744-PARK to launch an immediate investigation to have their ticket voided if an error did occur.
And she assured me the city “will continue to monitor all our parking enforcement aides for issues and patterns of errors, including this individual, and take disciplinary action.”
It’s always good to hear some tough talk coming out of City Hall, but it seems what we really need is a ticket-writing technology upgrade to protect the electronic-meter-paying public from the costly inconvenience of errors.
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