When and why did Shreveport decide to install parking meters?
At some point, you may have wondered when or why Shreveport began considering the installation of parking meters. According to an article in the Shreveport Times, Shreveport began considering the use of Parking meters in 1935, if not before then! A mere 4 months after the first ever parking meters were installed in the US. In the Tuesday, November 19, 1935, edition of the Shreveport Times, an article titled “Ask Council to Study Park-O-Meters” was important enough to be prominently placed “above the fold” (meaning it was important enough to be prominently displayed on the upper half of the front page. The part that is visible while the paper is on display). The most important and/or enticing stories are places ‘above the fold’ to entice customers to buy the newspaper. Apparently, downtown parking and the potential installation of parking meters was a big deal in 1935.
The article, as indicated within the subtitle, discusses the Chamber of Commerce’s efforts to research the use of parking meters. A sub-committee of the retail merchant’s division of the Chamber of Commerce found that a “new system of park-o-meters is meeting with widespread approval among the merchants, shoppers and the public generally in the cities where they have been installed”. The Chamber of Commerce decided to endorse a traffic plan like the one being used in Oklahoma City- the birthplace of the modern-day parking meter. A request for the City Council to “investigate the possibility of placing Park-O-Meters in the downtown business district” and to use the associated revenue to “place the Shreveport Police Department on an eight-hour shift basis” was contained in a resolution passed by the advisory committed of the retail merchant’s division of the Chamber of Commerce.
H.L. Richardson, a member of the sub-committee, had been appointed to make a “full investigation” and went to Oklahoma City to learn the “benefits and defects” of the meters. Richardson, who was interviewed for the story, said that “committee after committee has been appointed here to study and find a possible means of solving the parking problem. Tags of the Chamber of Commerce were issued, but they were abused by our own citizens and the privilege has been abolished. Today parking hogs come downtown with nothing at all to do. They hang around the streets in sight of their car and remove it just in time to keep from being handed a ticket.”
TO BE CONTINUED…
