When Parallel Parking
Was New and Meters
Seemed Un-American
July 30, 2007; Page B1

Parking on city streets today is a cinch compared with the 1930s, when free, unlimited parking was considered every American's constitutional right.

Just as their grandparents had tied their horses to the general store's rail, American drivers expected handy curb space for their cars when they went to town. By the 1930s, however, there were too many cars and too few curbs.

The result was chaos. Employees of downtown businesses hogged spaces for whole days; some merchants deliberately parked their cars in front of competitors' stores. Other drivers circled the narrow streets waiting for a rare free space. Trucks loading or unloading double-parked. In most cities, there were no marks on curbs to delineate spaces. In the few timed spaces, enforcement by chalking the tires was easy to beat. And the art of parallel parking was in its infancy.

"None of our cities were designed for motor traffic, and only in the West were they young enough when the automobile arrived en masse to adapt themselves to the new traffic medium," wrote Arthur Pound in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1938.

For drivers, downtown bottlenecks were maddening, but for retail businesses that depended on customer turnover, they were ruinous. Some large cities tried banning all parking on a few major thoroughfares, but many shoppers wouldn't walk even a few blocks from their car to a store. They took their business to the periphery of the city.

In 1932, the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce decided it had to do something about the city's downtown parking problem. A local newspaper editor, Carl Magee, was charged with finding a solution. Mr. Magee invented the park-o-meter.

Crammed roadways and rush-hour traffic once were only problems in major U.S. cities such as New York and Los Angeles, but traffic snarls are becoming a growing problem for more cities. The number of metro areas where rush-hour travelers spend more than 20 hours per year stewing in traffic grew from a mere five in 1982 to 51 in 2003, according to the most recent report from the Texas Transportation Institute.

Traffic policies have long focused on road building. But some now argue that opening toll-based express lanes or instituting extra fees for rush-hour drivers -- as London did in 2003 -- may drive people toward public transportation and make commutes more efficient. Are there unintended consequences of such policies? And how big a problem is congestion if -- in the end -- commuters still are willing brave the morning rush?

The Online Journal asked economists Peter Gordon, of the University of Southern California, and Matthew Kahn, of the University of California, Los Angeles, to discuss the costs of traffic congestion, the problem it poses -- or doesn't pose -- for cities and how policy options such as London's traffic congestion charges might play on this side of the pond.