Chicago City Mayor Rahm Emanuel is attempting to make up for what he describes as the mistakes of a previous administration by renegotiating its 75 year deal with the private company now responsible for running the city’s parking meters.

In 2008, the Chicago Parking Meters group paid $1.15 billion for the lease to monetize about 36,000 street parking spaces. It is the third-biggest street meter system in the U.S. and the largest to be privately administered.

The agreement was endorsed by the then Chicago alderman to the tune of 40 votes to 5 in just two days, with the money received said to be used by the council to address a budget deficit.

According to the Chicago Tribune the deal “stands as one of the dumbest and most despised decisions in the council's history.” It is believed that the city greatly underestimated the real value of the meters as a stable revenue source for city coffers.

To make matters worse, the private company was last month seeking an additional $49 million from the city as compensation for lost revenue caused by street closures. This amount was the result of a two year audit undertaken by the company itself, and has been questioned at all levels. The current Mayor subsequently refused to pay, forcing both parties back to the negotiating table.

Under terms agreed to this week, the Mayor has obtained control over the processing of data to determine whether the city owes or is owed money from future adjustments to available street parking. This arrangement is hoped to save tax payers $1B over the remaining lifetime of the lease.

In further negotiations the city agreed to extend metered parking by one hour in most areas of the city and until midnight in other areas. In return, the private company will allow free Sunday parking in neighbourhoods outside the city’s core.

Terms of the revised agreement and legal settlement were put before Chicago’s city council on May 8, who now have 30 days to review it.

A former parking lot manager at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC has pleaded guilty to his involvement in a conspiracy to steal more than $1 million in visitors' parking fees.

For just over three years, Abeselom Hailemariam was the manager at the 2,000-vehicle parking lot servicing the renowned museum precinct. He was responsible for supervising parking-booth attendants and accounting for revenue.

Prosecutors have alleged that under Mr Hailemariam’s supervision, attendants would keep visitors' parking fees and conceal the thefts by failing to hand out serialised parking tickets and by unplugging the electronic vehicle counters in the booths.

The conspiracy involved the attendants paying Mr Hailemariam a share of the stolen revenues amounting to almost $1.4 million. Having  pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit theft of public money, he is scheduled to be sentenced in July, facing a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

According to the Washington Post Mr Hailemariam was arrested at Dulles International Airport where he was returning from Ethiopia after five months residing there.

Two former parking-booth attendees who were part of the conspiracy have already pleaded guilty to their roles in the thefts and have been handed sentences of between 2 and 3 years.

Every week we read about new car parking technology being unveiled somewhere in the world.

This week, The New York Times published about the latest smart phone application being trialled in the Bronx, using real time updates to direct drivers to available parking spaces. The technology also allows for motorists to pay for parking with their mobile phones on the spot and refill their meter remotely.

Iowa’s technological ‘advance’ is to allow motorists to pay with their credit card. It’s not rocket science, but it is progress for that particular state.

These advances are supposedly intended to make our lives more convenient and our cities more efficient. However, there are downsides to these innovations, for drivers at least.

As mentioned in Travis Okulski’s piece this week, new parking meter technology could eventually make parking enforcement officers obsolete. One particular company is manufacturing parking meters with photo imaging and sensory elements, intelligent enough to read licence plates and detect when a space has been vacated (or not). These meters are so ‘clever’ they take a picture of your plates if you overstay your welcome, and almost as a courtesy, the meters can give you the option to pay your fine on the spot. This may be decidedly inconvenient for those of us who occasionally risk the wrath of the parking officer.

To top things off, even if you see someone pull out of a spot and they still have time on the meter, the meter will reset to before you are able to receive any benefit – a further source of revenue for local councils.

As we all know, technology has its benefits, just be careful what you wish for!

Cristina Lynn attended the Parking Industry Exhibition held in Chicago earlier this month on behalf of the Parking Association of Australia.

The exhibition took place over three days showcasing a wide range of suppliers with many representatives from access control, parking guidance, ticket manufacturers, LED lighting and on-street technology. A very interesting group of speakers from universities, municipalities and consultants presented case study based situations that resonated with the delegates’ own issues and concerns.

An international panel of speakers comprising Sandra Smith (Canada), Kevin Warwood (New Zealand), Peter Guest (UK) and Cristina, discussed parking policy issues in our respective parts of the world.

A Women In Parking reception allowed for furthering discussions regarding a potential Australian Chapter of this organisation.

John Van Horne and his team from the magazine Parking Today did a great job in organizing this annual event and were everywhere the whole time ensuring it all went smoothly. There was nothing humble about this PIE!

On her way home Cristina stopped off in New York to review the work being done there by parking enforcement officers!

Time Business & Money has reported passengers flying into San Francisco now have an alternative when deciding on their rental car choice. An innovative peer-to-peer car-share program is operating out of the international airport. Travellers can choose to leave their car prior to boarding their flight, allowing fellow travellers to use their vehicle while they are away.

The company running this program, Flightcar, says it benefits car owners, saving them parking fees, while the hirer will find the cost only a fraction of the price of traditional rental companies. Aside from the ‘free parking’, Flightcar compensates owners with fuel vouchers, a car wash and guarantees protection of the vehicle through an insurance scheme.

Flightcar is looking to expand to other airports in the US.

The next wave of mobile phone based parking technology is being rolled out across two of America’s most populated cities, New York and Phoenix.

Pango, an Israel based company, claims to be the world's first provider of pay by mobile phone parking solutions, developing the technology to give consumers a convenient and easy way to park using their phone.

The company says that cities and parking operators can increase their revenues, lower their operating costs and understand who their customers are. They say that this information will mean businesses can reach consumers with local offers.

The US arm of the company, headquartered in New York City, is using the launch there and in Phoenix as a platform to aggressively rollout Pango to other American cities during 2013.

In New York, PangoUSA has partnered with Imperial Parking which is the largest privately owned garage company in the city, while in Phoenix, they have partnered with Red Development's CityScape.

A novel solution to managing parking fines for those found to have overstayed their limit has been proposed by Anam Ardeshiri at the annual Transportation Research Board conference in Washington last month.

Mr Ardeshiri claims that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime for an inadvertent misjudgement of time by minutes, compared with those who intentionally run the gauntlet by exploiting the system by hours. In Arizona, the fine is $32US, (by the by, in NSW this offence attracts a fine of $99AU).

Mr Ardeshiri, a Ph.D. student at Morgan State University, discovered this inequity the hard way. He asked himself this question; “wouldn’t you be willing to pay more per hour to park if it meant you’d never get a ticket?”

According to Emily Badger from the Atlantic Cities, this is how it works.

“You’d pull into a parking spot and swipe your credit card at a meter in exchange for a receipt placed on your windshield. Then when you’re ready to leave, you’d insert the same receipt back into the machine – as you would in many parking garages – and it would debit your account for the precise curb time you used. In this system, the city would get rid of parking time maximums. But spots would grow more expensive by the hour (costing, for example, $2 for the first hour, $4 for the second hour, and so on), providing a strong incentive against people staying forever. And Ardeshiri proposes using dynamic pricing that would make spots even more expensive during peak periods”.

The claim is that the system designed by Mr Ardeshiri would make it possible to eliminate parking tickets all together. It essentially mimics user-pay schemes found around the world such as time-of-day-tolling, CBD congestion charges and “tag on, tag off” integrated transport tickets such as London’s Oyster card.

Ms Badger concedes that it is still entirely possible to game such a system and fears finding a municipal parking authority willing to implement it may be tough. However,, the idea puts forward a good case for abolishing parking tickets.