Got a truck you use for work? You likely aren’t allowed to park it overnight in front of your house in Evanston.
Ald. Tom Suffredin (6th), responding to a constituent complaint, is seeking to change that.
Under the city code, parking commercial vehicles is banned overnight on any block “in which more than one-half the buildings are used for residential purposes.”
The city refers to the state vehicle code for the definition of commercial vehicles, and it defines them as any vehicle with a gross weight rating of over 10,000 pounds.
Under that rule, for example, a Ford F-150 pickup truck, with a gross vehicle weight rating of less than 10,000 pounds, can be parked overnight on a residential street, but most Ford F-250 and F-350 pickup trucks are over the limit.
Suffredin’s constituent said he’d parked in front of his house on Lincolnwood Drive for two years before finding a $45 ticket on his truck one morning recently.
Local folklore is that parking enforcement officers look for contractor’s signs on the side of trucks to determine which vehicles to ticket, but the city code provision doesn’t make signage the determining factor of whether a truck is commercial.
Mayor Daniel Biss, at Thursday’s Referrals Committee meeting, said he got the point that the rule appears to discriminate against blue-collar workers — it appears to say: “Sorry, no painters or carpenters get to live in Evanston unless their garage is big enough” for their truck.
The Referrals Committee voted to send the issue to the Administration and Public Works Committee for consideration sometime in the first quarter of next year.