After years of steady declines, the number of parking tickets issued in the city went up last year to 2.5 million, a six percent increase from 2012.

It was the first time that the number of tickets issued increased from the previous year since 2008, when 2.7 million tickets were written.

While several different city agencies and private companies issued the tickets, the biggest jump last year was in the number of tickets written by police officers, who issued more than 1 million in 2013.

That’s nearly 170,0000, or nearly 20 percent more than they wrote in 2012.

The spike in tickets written by police was greater than that of any other enforcement group. The city’s fifty parking enforcement aides, who unlike the police, have only one job — wrote more than a million tickets last year, but that was just a six percent bump over 2012.

Tickets written by private enforcement companies decreased. SERCO, a contractor hired for parking enforcement, wrote almost 360,000 tickets in 2013, an eleven percent drop. Enforcement crews for Chicago Parking Meters, the company that controls the city’s parking meter system for the next 70 years, wrote more than 106,000 expired-meter tickets, down fifteen percent from 2012.

Source.