Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

Meanwhile, the initial function of meters—to impose order on the streets by pricing a scarce resource—was subsumed by a new focus: making money. Of course, this had always been part of the meter’s utility for local governments. But since politicians were reluctant to raise meter rates, the primary way that meters put money in city coffers by the start of the twenty-first century wasn’t from payments but from penalties. In fact, cities didn’t even need meters at all to make a ton of money off parking—in a perverse way, the free-for-all engendered by removing the meters encouraged illegal parking, citations for which became a major component of revenue-driven policing. In a review of this practice in Ferguson, Missouri, published after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, the Department of Justice told of a low-income woman who parked illegally one day in 2007. She received two citations and a $151 fine, plus fees. She attempted to make partial payments of $25 and $50, which the court refused. Then she missed her court date, resulting in an arrest warrant and an escalating series of fines. In the seven years that followed her parking ticket, the woman was arrested twice. She spent six days in jail. By the end of 2014, she had wound up paying the court $550 but still owed $541. All for a parking ticket. Counterintuitively, this state of affairs is exacerbated by cheap or free parking, which creates the supply constraints that make it necessary to break the rules, and haphazard ...