Eight fun facts about parking meters you didn’t know

Here are eight things you didn’t know about parking meters.

The story goes that downtown Oklahoma City’s streets were so choked with employees’ parked cars that local businesses were concerned that actual customers were staying away. Carl C Magee, a newspaper editor and member of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, was asked for ideas on how to solve the problem, and he came up with a coin-operated timed meter. While an earlier parking-meter patent was filed in 1928 – it was particularly complicated, requiring a connection between the car’s battery and the meter – the first working meter was initiated by Carl Magee and invented by Holger George Thuesen and Gerald A Hale. Installed near the corner of First Street and Robinson Avenue in 1935, it was ominously named the ‘Black Maria’.

It makes sense that the first fine would follow the first meter, and the relentless force of this logic hit one unlucky fellow in Oklahoma City. Reverend CH North of Oklahoma City’s Third Pentecostal Holiness Church sauntered into downtown OK City to run some errands. He pulled into a park, checked his pockets for a nickel and, upon realising he didn’t have one, hoofed directly to the nearest store for change. When he returned to his car he became an important piece of world history: the first person in the world to get a parking ticket, and the first to use an excuse we’ve all tried: “I just went to get change.” We feel for you, Father.

This picture from Ilsan, South Korea, is of a human parking meter in its natural habitat. These dudes and gals ride their bikes around the city to their allocated street and sit in red chairs while wearing matching red hats. Their job is to charge street-parkers the right amount, as designated by the local council.

As meters were rolled out across different parts of the USA, a number of court cases were brought to challenge their legality. Why? The widely presented argument was that everyone should have the absolute right to use the streets. However, case law has generally disagreed with this assertion, creating a principle that, generally speaking, parking meters are legal if used only for regulating parking and not revenue-raising – an idea that could be forever challenged but seems to be holding firm.

Carrying on a tradition of firsts for Tassie – like the invention of the humidicrib and Launceston’s underground sewer system, the third in the world and the first in Australia – Hobart City Council installed Australia’s first parking meter on 1 April 1955. The going rate was sixpence (about 5 cents) for 30 minutes. The rest of the country soon followed.

James Bagarozzo, along with accomplice Lawrence Charles, stole US$210,000 from the parking meters of Buffalo, New York, by becoming a parking-meter mechanic and rigging the machines so he could collect the coins. It took him 10 years to amass that amount. He got caught. He had to pay the money back. We wonder if he paid in coins.

Somewhere in rural California sits a solitary parking meter. It is the only parking meter in an entire town and in an entire year it collects $100 in revenue. This bounty goes to the town’s annual fireworks festival. The name of the town? Appropriately, it’s Winters, and its fireworks festival isn’t very good.

There are a lot of weird conspiracy theories surrounding the Beatles, like the one that purports that, in the midst of their heyday, all of them except Paul died, and the others were replaced by actors. Or the one that suggests they were plants of the government. Or that they were part of an Illuminati plan to control the minds of the youth, along with soft drugs, to… cajole that generation into admiring meter maids? There can be little other explanation for their confounding track ‘Lovely Rita’. The tale goes that during a recording session, Paul spotted a meter maid issuing his car, parked on Abbey Road, a ticket. Having noted that “she looked much older” and her outfit “made her look a little like a military man”, Paul enquired to Rita, “When are you free to take some tea with me?” The conspiracy theories are pretty far out, man, but maybe the best clue to this song’s inspiration is the fact that this song appears on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles’ most psychedelic album.

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