Roadside Wire
Happy Birthday bane of our existence!
- Published on Thursday, 13 May 2010 18:36
Necessary evil or proper tool for urban traffic management? What do you think? This story comes from Wired.com.
May 13, 1935: Enter the Parking Meter
By Tony Borroz
1935: An entrepreneurial politician files a patent application for a device that will elicit curses and contempt from generations of motorists: the parking meter.
If it weren’t for Pearl Harbor, FDR might have called May 13 a day that will live in infamy. It was 75 years ago that Carl C. Magee of Oklahoma City sought a patent for the world’s first parking meter. Many will come to see the invention as a bane of urban living.
Soon after Magee filed to protect his intellectual property, the world’s first installed parking meters were put into nickel-gulping service right there in Oklahoma City in July 1935. Your five cents (about $.80 in today’s money) got you anywhere from 15 minutes’ to an hour’s worth of parking, depending on location.
Some would say things have been going downhill ever since.