PD Editorial: Still unwelcome after all these years

Editorials represent the views of The Press Democrat editorial board and The Press Democrat as an institution. The editorial board and the newsroom operate separately and independently of one another.

One of America’s least popular devices just marked a milestone. The parking meter, which debuted in Oklahoma City in 1935, turned 88 on Tuesday.

The first meters were placed at 20-foot intervals along downtown streets, and parking cost a nickel an hour.

Presumably, the first parking ticket wasn’t far behind, though there’s no mention in a short item about the anniversary at history.com. The website does say — and we hope you won’t hold this against us — that the Park-o-Meter was the brainchild of a newspaper publisher named Carl Magee.

Oklahoma City’s goal was to promote turnover of parking spaces in a busy commercial district. Meters did the trick, and by the early 1940s there were more than 140,000 of them in the United States. A decade ago, it was estimated that there were between 4 million and 5 million parking meters. If there are any fewer today, it’s probably because some cities have replaced mechanical meters with kiosks serving entire blocks and app-based collection systems.

The only old-fashioned meters left in downtown Santa Rosa are part of a whimsical sculpture on Fifth Street — but parking fees (and fines) remain.

While plenty of people would welcome a one-way trip to the nearest scrap yard for every meter, paid parking is an unfortunate fact of life in countless cities.

Napa may be about to join the list. Make that rejoin the list. Napa took out its parking meters in 1993, about a half-century after they were installed. With the growing popularity of downtown and the Oxbow district, finding parking can be a time-consuming challenge. So the city started working on a plan that could bring paid parking back to Napa.

Windsor is dealing with its own parking issues, including busy weekends at the Town Green and the long-anticipated start of SMART train service, when commuters might choose to leave their cars near the station for the day. Rather than charging for parking, the council is moving to establish time limits on about 120 parking spots in high-demand areas. Several local cities, including Petaluma and Sonoma, already enforce time limits for parking downtown.

As annoying as time limits and tickets can be, there are good arguments against free parking in areas where people congregate to shop and eat. Convenient spaces get tied up all day by early arriving employees. Delivery trucks double-park, interfering with the flow of traffic. People waste time, and burn fuel, cruising for parking.

In Napa, a 2022 survey found 35% of people spent 10 minutes or more searching for parking, and nearly a third ended up parking at least four blocks away from their destination. The city also found that 38% of vehicles stayed three hours or more in spaces limited to two hours.

Moreover, parklets for outdoor dining — a popular COVID accommodation that outlasted the pandemic — reduced the number of downtown parking spaces in Santa Rosa and elsewhere.

Perhaps the most common complaint we hear about downtown Santa Rosa is that people don’t want to pay for parking.

That probably isn’t going to change, but whatever you think about parking meters, at least the cost hasn’t gone up much. Adjusted for inflation, that 1935 nickel would be $1.11 today — slightly more than the $1 an hour charged for street parking in most of downtown Santa Rosa.

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Editorials represent the views of The Press Democrat editorial board and The Press Democrat as an institution. The editorial board and the newsroom operate separately and independently of one another.