Not sure that's quite making the argument you think it is.
Gross revenue is roughly $12/resident/year, and that's not factoring in administrative costs, staffing, etc.
That's pretty small change.
Who cares about per resident? That's $35 million in profit per year already (after paying off the contract). That's not nothing.
If admin costs and staffing come anywhere even close to that, the contractor is screwing up.
>Since 2009, CPM has invested $38 million to modernize the City’s on‐street parking, replacing 36,000 outdated single‐space, coin‐operated ‘meters’ with 4,700 state‐of‐the‐art pay stations that accept both credit and debit cards. In addition, CPM has established a refund option, a 24‐hour customer service center and a state‐of‐the‐art maintenance and repair process.
https://parkchicago.com/about/
So one year's profit investment into infra.
tl;dr if you can't read it due to GDPR:
>Parking meter revenues are nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. With 61 years to go on the 75-year lease, Chicago Parking Meters LLC has now recouped its entire $1.16 billion investment, plus $502.5 million more.