Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

The story of the parking meter begins in the 1930s with a revelation on the part of an Oklahoma City newspaper editor named Carlton C. Magee: get the nine-to-five crowd to park ten, five, or even two minutes away, and you could save easy-access curb spaces for deliveries and customers. Eighty percent of the cars parked curbside in the state capital belonged to employees at downtown businesses. So Magee invented the Park-O-Meter, which replaced the inefficient and unreliable “chalk the tires” practice. Oklahoma City did a trial with one side of the street metered and the other unmetered. The city manager reported the results: “On the unmetered side is confusion, cars jammed together, fenders being bent, cars being pushed in front of fire hydrants, and traffic being impeded by those who are trying to back into cramped parking spaces, while shoppers can hardly find parking spaces open. On the metered side is order, sufficient room for every car to be parked and driven out quickly and easily, and there are usually parking spaces open so that shoppers can park within a block of any store or bank.” By 1938, there were meters in eighty-five U.S. cities, and by 1955, all big U.S. cities had metered business districts and retail shopping streets.