“Free storage offered to shoppers by merchandising interests is an economic error and acts as a boomerang not only to the merchant, but to regular storage garage enterprises.”
Hawley S. Simpson, Essex County, NJ Traffic Engineer, September 1927
I recently had some merry reasons to spend an afternoon in downtown Collingswood, one of South Jersey’s most vibrant and charming downtown strips. I rode my bike there, which turned out to be the right decision since Collingswood, like most of South Jersey’s metered towns, has decided to give the parking public a big old lump of coal for Christmas by turning off their parking meters.
For metered downtowns like Collingswood, Westmont, and Haddonfield, the strategy makes sense on its face. These downtowns compete with other nearby strips like Oaklyn, Audubon, and Haddon Heights[1], each with its own charm and free parking year-round. At a time of year that can make or break businesses, why chance losing customers to these neighbors when you can just bag the meters and level the playing field?
The reason this logic is so flawed is best explained through the fascinating history of the little device under the wrapping paper, which begins about 100 years ago and 1,500 miles away from Collingswood.
A fun fact about Oklahoma City, Oklahoma is that a sizable chunk of the metro area sits directly on top of an oil field. The aptly named Oklahoma City Oil Field was discovered in 1928 and soon thereafter, oil-related businesses began to spring up in an already thriving downtown area. In short order, parking and traffic congestion increased substantially, and retail businesses in the area began to lose frustrated customers to competing districts. As the need for action grew urgent, Oklahoma City did what any good municipal government would do in such a circumstance: They formed a committee.
Enter Carlton Magee, a lawyer, newspaperman, and Renaissance man if ever there was one. Before arriving in Oklahoma City, Magee had been editor of several publications in New Mexico[2] where he made a habit of writing bombshell exposés of the power players of the era. One such article examining the changing fortunes of Interior Secretary Albert Bacon Fall is credited with essentially breaking the Teapot Dome Scandal. Eventually, the powers that be grew tired of Magee’s antics, and began to take legal action leading to “the most blatant political trials in New Mexico History.” Magee was in short order found guilty of libel by Judge David Leahy, a one-time Magee target himself who was all too eager to pile on a few contempt-of-court charges. But Magee eventually won a pardon from the Governor[3], and was a free man on August 9, 1925 when he met Leahy again, this time in the lobby of a Las Vegas hotel. Leahy jumped Magee, pummeling him on the floor. Magee eventually freed himself, drew his piece, and fired, injuring Leahy and killing a bystander. Leahy, being the great legal thinker that he was, apparently implicated himself in the trial and Magee was acquitted.
Magee finally decided a change of scenery was in order, heading for the then-greener pastures in Oklahoma City. In 1933, someone looked at Magee’s resume and realized that the man who broke the Teapot Dome scandal and subsequently survived several years of retaliatory show trials and a gun fight would just be the PERFECT candidate to lead the world’s first parking advisory committee. Putting those investigative skills to use, Magee quickly realized that people would naturally gravitate to the closest available parking spaces to their destination. For the early-rising oil workers that were the first to arrive downtown, those were the on-street parking spaces near their downtown businesses. This left precious little supply for the employees and, crucially, the customers of the retail and service businesses downtown, who arrived later.
Magee hypothesized that this simple dynamic explained the vast majority of the problems downtown OKC was experiencing[4], and realized that charging a time-based fee for curb parking was a potentially powerful solution. Working with Oklahoma State University engineering professors H.G. Thuesen and Gerald A. Hale, Magee in 1933 developed the world’s first parking meter, dubbed the “Black Maria.[5]” In 1935, 150 meters were installed throughout downtown and OKC had the world’s first priced street parking—a bargain at 5 cents per hour! But because of skepticism of the newfangled concept caused, the initial roll-out only took place on one side of the street. It took all of three days for the business owners on the non-metered streets to officially petition for metering, and downtown OKC soon found itself with a well-functioning parking system and a new source of revenue to boot.
Fully 90 years after Magee conceived humanity’s first downtown parking plan, I am seeing a similar dynamic in play in nearly every downtown that I’m tasked with writing a plan for. Absent some sort of regulation, local employees and/or residents gobble up the best-situated parking, forcing the later-arriving customers to cruise in search of what’s left. You can address this to some extent with time limits or even a form of “good neighbor agreement,” but once the intensity of the built environment and land uses pass a certain point, metering is the only solution.
In a sense, downtown Collingswood represents an ideal use case for parking meters. Observing the built environment and usage patterns, it is clear to me that the meters are warranted. Additionally, there are free public parking resources just off the main strip which can accommodate the longer-stay demand diverted from the metered stalls. It is a well-conceived and well-functioning parking system. Bagging the meters here is the worst possible thing you can do, reintroducing the problem that meters were literally invented to solve. Doing it at Christmastime, when one might expect an influx of both customers and the employees to accommodate them, is the worst possible time. The resulting increase in cruising and congestion is certainly palpable.
Westmont is a slightly trickier situation, as sizable chunks of the early built environment have been redeveloped with off-street parking. Predictably, these stalls have significantly lower demand than stalls adjacent to denser development, and even with bags they often sit empty. Westmont also has no off-street public lots to which to drive demand from the metered spaces. In this case, Westmont should simply leave the meters next to the emptiest stalls bagged year-round. The best bet at extracting some level of utility for these stalls is to retain them as free resources to serve as the relief valve for the higher-demand metered stalls.
The seasonal practice of bagging meters is the grinchiest thing a city can do. Seasonal free parking is indeed a “boomerang” that actively worsens traffic and parking congestion, making it harder for customers to access stores at a time when stores need them the most. It also turns off an important stream of municipal revenue, while at the same time reinforcing a notion that meter fees are an unnecessary tax rather than an essential, market-based intervention to manage resources.
Sources and Further Reading:
Park-O-Matic Company, Our History. https://www.pom.com/our-history/, accessed December 21, 2023.
Roberts, Susan Ann. The Political Trials of Carl C. Magee. New Mexico Historical Review, 1975.
Shoup, Donald. Cruising for parking. Transport Policy, Volume 13 Issue 6, 2006.
[1] The metered downtowns cited herein—Collingswood, Westmont, and Haddonfield—are centered along modern-day Haddon Avenue, which follows the right-of-way of Pennsylvania Railroad’s West Jersey and Seashore Railroad. The non-metered downtowns of Oaklyn, Audubon, and Haddon Heights are situated along three different streets that each cross Reading Railroad’s historic Atlantic City Railroad. Perhaps some combination of the age (the Pennsy cities are slightly older), the parent company’s size (Pennsy was a significantly larger railroad than Reading), and the along vs. across configuration are predictive of modern-day parking demand? The railroad-tied history of this area is a fascinating topic itself and something I intend to explore in a future post.
[2] In 1922, Magee began publishing Magee’s Independent, which would soon become The Albuquerque Tribune. The Tribune was eventually acquired by E.W. Scripps and continued publication until 2008. The Dante quote that Magee chose as The Tribune’s motto—“Give light and the people will find their own way”—was adopted by Scripps and remains the corporate motto today, and is the inspiration for the company’s lighthouse logo.
[3] Magee’s pardons were themselves a fascinating legal question that were heard by New Mexico’s Supreme Court and continue to have legal ramifications today. At issue was whether the executive had the power to issue pardons for contempt of court charges. Since contempt charges are unique in that they are leveled by the courts themselves as a way maintaining order therein, it was argued that an executive pardon infringed upon the independence of the judiciary. New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that the pardons were not only legal but were in fact a crucial check on the court’s power for the precisely the reasons at issue here, related to the impartiality (or lack thereof) of the judge issuing charges. The proceedings and ramifications are beautifully explained by Roberts in the cited paper.
[4] The relationship between parking policy and traffic congestion has been an active topic of research dating to Magee’s time, with the most important exploration coming from Donald Shoup in The High Cost of Free Parking (2005). In High Cost and the subsequent paper cited herein, Shoup shows that parking-related congestion can be eliminated by charging the fair market rate for street spaces. Shoup cites the Simpson paper from which I culled the epigraph to this essay as the study on the topic. While I have not been able to verify this, I suspect that Magee must have been familiar with and influenced by Simpson’s work.
[5] An earlier parking meter was designed and patented by Roger Babson, a Renaissance-type himself who founded an eponymous business school in Wellesley, MA, and correctly predicted an impending stock market crash the month prior to the great 1929 crash, among other achievements. However, his parking meter design relied upon using the parked car’s battery for a power source, an obvious impracticality. TO wit, the design was never produced nor installed, and thus Magee is generally credited as the device’s inventor.