Part of the problem for aldermen like Scott Waguespack trying to assess Morgan Stanley’s bid with a back-of-the-napkin calculation was that no one really knew how much parking should cost. While parking experts viewed meters as a tool to manage contested curb space, most residents had rightly come to see them as a sneaky, punishment-oriented moneymaking device. In 2016, for example, the country’s twenty-five largest cities collected $1.3 billion from illegal parking citations—about as much as they collected from meters and lucrative garage taxes put together!
