RoadsideOnline

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.

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I'm warning you. I'm about to write on a subject important to me that you might dismiss as not only entirely uninteresting but as having nothing to do with Mom N' Pop Culture. But please bear with me, because I believe this subject serves as a perfect microcosm of the larger subject this blog was created to discuss.

I'm into auto racing. Have been since as far back as I can remember. I liked racing before the sport hit the major leagues. I didn't realize the niche it occupied back then, mostly because back then I was occupying a pretty small niche myself. I was a kid. My interests were about what interested me, the concepts of niches, mainstreams and every other measures of popularity foreign to a self-absorbed child.

My interest in racing remains, and I don't make a secret of it. And almost every time somebody learns of my interest in the sport, they seem to consider racing from their own point of view and question how I could ever (being an apparently intelligent, interesting adult human-being) stand to sit and watch "cars going around in circles for hours."

"It's boring," they'll declare.

"I agree," I'll agree.

And they'll look at me funny.

This is the city

There are 100,000 vehicles in the city, some are new, some are old. They are all driven by people, people of all walks of life. Sometimes these vehicles break down. When they do, they call me. My name is Thursday, I drive a tow truck.

I was working the day watch out of the toll road division. It was Monday. The sun was shining when I got the call. A BMW was blocking the entrance ramp before the tolls. We needed to move it immediately. I headed to the plaza. There was the BMW at the end of the ramp with traffic piling up behind it. I had to move fast. I backed my flatbed to the truck. I jumped out and lowered my bed and attached my mini J’s to the frame.

As I was staring through the dirty windshield today, which, since it is now bug season here in New England the windshield is a little dirtier than normal, I started thinking about tipping.

I was always under the assumption that when you received good service you gave a good tip, when you received excellent service you left a bigger tip, and when you received bad service you left less or even no tip. Today it seems that waiters, I’m sorry – servers, expect an automatic 15% to 20%. It doesn’t matter if they were good or bad. My fiancé (who I will alternately refer to as my woman, my girl friend, my partner, my best friend, my soul mate, my love, my significant other) and I love to go out to breakfast on our day off together. We love diners and small local restaurants. When I sit in a booth and am having breakfast I expect the server to come over and ask me if I want more coffee, preferably she will be carrying the pot at the time. I shouldn’t have to ask her for more. That is the difference between good customer service and not so good.