A couple weeks ago, the village sent out reminders to residents who hadn’t yet bought their vehicle license — that $74 virtual sticker that lets you park on the street during the day. If you’ve lived here longer than a cup of coffee, you know parking in Oak Park is more divisive than naming the best burger in town (it’s Carnivore, and I will die on that hill).
The $74 doesn’t bother me. What does is our overnight parking ban. For the uninitiated, Oak Park doesn’t allow parking on the street between 2:30 and 6 a.m. — unless you request an overnight pass. You get three for free each month, and then it’s $7 per night after that.
There are two main reasons we’re told this rule exists. One is safety — the idea being that if a police officer sees a car parked on the street in the middle of the night, it’s either suspicious or belongs to someone who’s about to get a $50 reminder to move it. The second reason, though less often said out loud, is housing density. Limiting overnight parking helps discourage homeowners from carving up single-family homes into multi-units. Fewer parking options, fewer renters — simple math.
Now both reasons make sense in theory. But in practice, we’ve got a fairness problem. Enforcement of the overnight parking ban is directly tied to how dense your neighborhood is. If you live near apartments, your odds of getting a ticket are sky-high. If you’re on a block of single-family homes, you’re probably safe. It’s not that one group is breaking the rules more — it’s just more efficient for the police to ticket in dense areas. Efficient, yes. Fair, not even close.
So here’s the deal: either enforce the ban consistently or get rid of it.
Option 1: Enforce it
Hire an overnight parking team whose only job is to write tickets from 2:30 to 6 a.m. The revenue would more than cover their salaries, and the police could focus on more pressing issues than catching a Honda Accord sleeping curbside. And honestly, we don’t need much infrastructure to make this happen. We live near two colleges — hand a few students an e-bike, a stack of ticket books, and a case of Celsius, and you’ll have the most motivated enforcement squad in the western suburbs.
Option 2: End it
Let residents buy an annual overnight parking pass for, say, $1,000. That’s cheaper than what many pay now for off-street spots. Cap how many are sold per block and keep parking to one side of the street. Simple.
And if we ended the ban, we’d probably see more people converting their garages — not their basements — into useful spaces like home offices, gyms, or extra rooms for kids. The average Oak Park garage is about 20-30% larger than the home’s primary bedroom. I like my car, but it probably doesn’t need more space to sleep than I do.
Look, people will always argue about parking here. But the current system isn’t working. Either we care enough to enforce the overnight ban fairly, or we admit it’s an outdated rule that should fade quietly into the Oak Park night — right around 2:30 a.m.
Vince Gay has over 20 years of experience in education, ranging from classroom teacher to building administrator. The proud parent of two school-aged children, he has been an active member of the Oak Park community for more than a decade.
