28

What's 28 mean to you?

To me there are a few meanings...

• Hannah's golden birthday
• My age when Nate was born
• The number of one arm pushups I can do... Ha! I crack myself up...

To those of us that park in downtown Chicago, 28 has a whole new meaning:

The number of quarters it takes to park for two hours.

The citizens aren't taking it too well.

Looks like King Daley and the Princes of Chicago made another smoove move by privatizing the meters.

Story from The Consumerist:

Parking Meter Revolt: Chicagoans Are Vandalizing Parking Meters In Protest!

from Consumerist by Meg Marco

The Chicago parking meter saga continues today with a post from theexpiredmeter.com, a blog about Chicago parking tickets and how to fight them. The post has photos of parking meters being spray painted, destroyed and otherwise defaced. Guess people aren't too thrilled with paying 28 quarters for 2 hours in the Loop...

An entire block of parking meters, numbering nearly 20, were spotted along west Irving Park in the Albany Park neighborhood, that had both the front and back of their heads spray painted black. Once spray painted, these meters are unreadable by Parking Enforcement Aides and therefore, vehicles can't be ticketed as it's impossible to see if the meters were fed or not.

Some angry citizens are going for the simple approach and simply peeling the stickers off the meters so that they don't have the instructions required by law.

One tipster named Brian says, "In some cases, these decals just peel right off the front of the meter with little or no effort. When these stickers were originally applied, the weather was very cold and it seems the adhesive didn't adhere correctly. These stickers just come right off. They also appear to be too big to fit into the recessed area they are being placed in. Yet another case of someone in charge not knowing what they are doing."

Other tactics that have been documented include, gluing quarters into the slots with superglue, ripping the meters out of the ground, stealing the coin box, and filling the meter with pennies so it breaks.

Apparently, the pennies don't register as money, but they do break the meter.

"We are finding a lot of pennies and nickels in coin slots," confirmed one LAZ Parking employee we confronted on the street. He wouldn't give us his name, his job it is to repair parking meters. "We see a lot of that going on."

And then, there's this:

Has The Parking Meter Revolt Begun? [The Expired Meter] (Thanks, Lindsay!)