Dumb. Outmoded. Unusable.

When people who live in the rest of Illinois complain about being fleeced by the sharpers in Springfield, they usually refer to state legislators, but the locals used to be pretty good at it too. Drop by the Levee district a century ago and you were likely to leave a poorer but wiser man, having been introduced to the state of the art in dice-loading, deck-stacking and drink-spiking while most cops looked the other way. The city of Springfield never actually cleaned up the Levee (tearing it down was simpler) and these days city hall is not just taking a cut of the petty swindles, it’s running one. 

I’ve been away for a while, but when I was in town to see the relatives, I dropped by downtown whenever I could. Even well into the 2000s a quarter, astonishingly, could still buy me 30 minutes of parking on the street during business hours. (In downtown Chicago a quarter will buy you about two minutes.) More recently I found it hard to tell if my quarter had dropped, because the polycarbonate copolymer in the meter windows was so yellowed I couldn’t see the pointer on the time display. I figured a meter reader couldn’t tell how much time was left on it either but – ker-chunk – I put a quarter in anyway. Better safe than ticketed.

Now that I’m living in Springfield again, I’m downtown more often. Recently I was going through the metal detectors at the state library and dutifully poured half a handful of quarters into the tray. “Meter money,” I grumbled aloud. The guard replied, “Nah, they’re still free.” 

Free? 

Still? 

I thus learned that street meter charges had been waived in 2020 to draw visitors downtown during COVID – because there’s nothing a responsible municipality wants to do more during a pandemic than to encourage people to get out and mingle. But neither the meters nor parking signs alert parkers to the change, presumably because “everybody knows” that the downtown meters are free. 

In a small town it’s easy to mistake one’s circle of friends and associates for the world, because they are the only world one knows. The problem is that Springfield, being a state government and regional medical center and international tourism destination, is part of a larger world whose residents know about parking in the capital city only what the capital city tells them. And Springfield doesn’t tell them anything. The website of the Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau offers whiz-bang graphics but no information about parking hours or rates. You would think that Downtown Springfield, Inc. would be shouting the news from the rooftops that street parking is free all the time, but click DSI’s “Parking Downtown” and you will be transported back to 2020 when “street parking is free after 5 p.m. on weekdays and free all day on Saturdays and Sundays.” 

That information ought to be on the street anyway, posted either on the meters or on adjacent informational signs. Trusting to word of mouth as a communications strategy is cheap but works only among people who talk about parking, which doesn’t include even all Springfieldians, much less out-of-towners. The result is that clueless drivers continue (we are told) to shove tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of quarters into dead meters every year. 

It is by now nearly six years since the city council decided to not charge motorists to use street parking spaces downtown. City officials said at the time that it would not replace or repair its aging meters until the city was able to switch the whole system to some version of smart parking. (As usual, Springfield is 10 to 20 years behind this urban innovation; smart parking apps first appeared in U.S. cities in the early 2010s.) Making unreliable meters free was not a bad idea. But that temporary expedient looks to be permanent policy and ought to be made plain to motorists. 

Fixing meters is a small problem that the city has bungled but fixing street parking won’t be enough to bring people back downtown anyway. Before the parking must come the people, and whether and how that happens is not in the hands of city hall. The city does have a role as cheerleader and facilitator, but to be an effective partner of the state of Illinois and private capital, the city of Springfield will have to do better. If it can’t afford to be smart, for instance, it can at least try to be honest. Remove the dumb old meters. If it can’t afford to do that, block the coin slots on the old ones – duct tape will do. If it can’t afford duct tape maybe city hall should get out of the city business. Or maybe it already has. 

Springfield native James Krohe has returned to Springfield after many years to see if what people are saying about it is true. Some of it is.

This article appears in January 22 – 26, 2026.