Meter Matters

Early in 1935, Editor Carlton Cole Magee of the Oklahoma News invented a device which he called the Dual Park-O-Meter because it had two purposes: to control parking, provide revenue. A typical parking meter is a waist-high metal post standing at curb's edge and crowned with a dial and a simple slot machine. When a coin is inserted, the meter marks time for the car parked beside it. When time is up, the driver must move his car away or risk a summons. In November 1935, Oklahoma City tried 174 of Editor Magee's meters, soon added 348 more. When indignant citizens squawked, a district court ruled that "free use" of streets does not include parking, which is a privilege granted by the municipality.

Since then, some 20,000 parking meters made by half-a-dozen companies at about $58 apiece have sprouted along the streets of 40-odd U. S. cities, among them: Dallas, Houston and El Paso, Tex.; Miami and St. Petersburg, Fla.; Providence, R. I.; Kansas City, Mo.; Macon, Ga.; Atlantic City, N. J.; Scranton, Pa. Last week the Denver city council voted to install them and Baltimore was considering it. Many cities are enthusiastic about their meters. Dallas, for example, gets about $140,000 yearly from her 1,500, considers they have "solved our parking problems." But not all cities are so satisfied. Topeka. Mobile, Salt Lake City and six other cities installed, then removed meters. Last week City Manager H. F. McElroy of Kansas City, Mo., which has 1,400 meters, snapped: "The meters solve none of the parking problems." In Alabama, where 500 meters were installed in Birmingham last September, motorists took the case to the Supreme Court, which outlawed meters as "an unauthorized exercise of the taxing power."

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