Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter D. Norton;

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter D. Norton;

Author:Peter D. Norton; [Norton, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262141000
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2008-04-18T00:00:00+00:00


Parking Meters

Parking meters later did the same for curb parking space. Free curb parking caused shortages, and shortages justified rationing (time limits) and outright bans. In 1935 Oklahoma City introduced parking meters. The idea originated in the city's Chamber of Commerce, which wanted to make the best use of limited space.132 Other cities followed this lead. Auto clubs feared that motorists’ nickels, like gasoline taxes, might end up in general revenues.133 Most state and local auto clubs therefore resisted meters, and by 1936 the American Automobile Association coordinated this defensive “war.” 134 Meters spread slowly.135

But some auto clubs favored meters from the start. The Texas State Automobile Association regretted “another form of taxation on the motorist,” but accepted meters because they “make the ‘street hog’ put his car in the garage.” 136 If meter revenues could be committed to street and parking expenses, they promised to make curb space an undisputed zone for motorists, just as gasoline taxes—once they were committed to streets and highways—helped give drivers proprietors’ rights in the travel lanes. Meters increased parking supply by making time limits easier to enforce, by discouraging motorists who did not value the space they parked in, and by rewarding cities that returned no-parking curbs to parkers. By 1940 parking meters were becoming an accepted feature of city streets, and after World War II they proliferated.137

As soon as motorists were paying a substantial share of the bill for roads and curb space, automotive interest groups began to make a proprietary claim to them. Already in 1924 Public Works, a trade journal addressed to road builders (among others), argued that “automobilists and other users of the highways are the ones to be satisfied,” since they “largely provide the funds whereby the highways are constructed and maintained.” The traffic expert had no business determining and securing the public interest in transportation, rather “it is the duty of the engineer to determine what these and the other taxpayers want and to provide these wants to the fullest extent possible.” The journal asked readers to consider “how large a percentage of the taxes are paid by automobile owners and, therefore, to what a very high degree the wishes of such owners should be consulted in the expenditure of taxes for constructing, reconstructing and maintaining streets and highways.” 138 Traffic engineers such as Detroit's Harold Gould considered motorists’ unregulated pursuit of their “personal whims or convenience” as the source of traffic problem, and proposed instead that “economics”—that is, expert-determined standards of efficiency—“should govern.” 139 Motordom fully agreed that “economics” should guide urban traffic management—-yet they understood economics to include the individual demands (or “personal whims”) that traffic engineers deplored.



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