"Don't follow leaders/Watch your parkin' meters." (Image by Quadell.)

In an article on Slate about the obsolescence of traditional parking meters, Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, reveals where, when and why the device originated. An excerpt:

“Seventy-five years ago, the world’s first parking meter cast its thin, ominous shadow on the streets of Oklahoma City. The meter was the brainchild of Carlton C. Magee, a local publisher and Chamber of Commerce Traffic Committee chief, and he hoped it would solve the city’s chronic parking problems. In the pre-meter days, police would drive around with stopwatches and chalk, enforcing the city’s parking time limits by marking the tires of cars seen squatting for too long, but the system was ill-equipped to handle the ‘endemic overparking’ problem. Even worse, a survey found that at any given time, 80 percent of the city’s spots were occupied by employees of downtown businesses—the very same businesses complaining that lack of parking was driving away shoppers. Calling for an ‘efficient, impartial, and thoroughly practical aid to parking regulation,’ Magee held a student-design contest and launched his instrument.”