When the newfangled “automobile” was widely adopted at the turn of the 20th century, there were few rules and no infrastructure for the meteoric rise of driving. An entire system for managing traffic was implemented one piece at a time in different cities to accommodate ever-more cars, in the short period of about twenty years. And so it was with the question of parking. Where will we put these vehicles, whether parked, chauffeured, or horse-driven, while people went about their business? It became clear that streets couldn’t hold them, and they would have to go somewhere.
On April 10, 1920, the Los Angeles City Council decided that “since ninety percent of those who entered the downtown area did so by streetcar, the best solution to overcrowding on the streets was to ban private automobile parking downtown.” Almost immediately, downtown merchants were negatively affected by the ban. By the third day, “an advertising manager for Jacoby Brothers, a [major department] store in the area covered by the ban, reported that business was down 15 percent,” reasoning that “there are many more women who use automobiles for shopping in Los Angeles than any other place in the country.” And by the ninth day, “another merchant claimed downtown business was down 40 percent.”
The ban did not stop women drivers from getting their shopping done; they simply took their business elsewhere. A rumor in a Los Angeles Record article on April 20 reported that a woman drove with her car to Pasadena and bought $23,000 worth of furniture “because the police made her remove her car from the vicinity of Barker Bros. store a few days ago when she was inspecting goods there.” The result — the parking ban was overturned just 17 days after the regulation went into effect.
Read about the development of parking and parking lots at the MIT Press Reader. -via Digg
(Image credit: iMahesh)