The Dawn and Demise of Angled Parking
By the first decade of the 20th century, angled parking was advocated as the best solution for parking and storing cars. This evolved naturally from the widespread tradition of curbing horses and wagons perpendicular to the curb; cars followed suit. With the growth of car ownership and the lack of ample space on main streets, angled parking was haphazardly introduced on narrow city streets to increase capacity. The result was often greater congestion, narrowing of driving lanes, and lack of passing space. Cars backing out of the angled parking also increased the hazards for passing cars.
By the 1920s, a few cities had established specific dimensional standards. These included minimum street widths, travel lanes and stall (parking space) dimensions. In New York City, for example, measurements for angled parking stipulated that spaces should be at 90, 45, 37½, or 30 degrees to the curb, with an ideal width of not less than 7½ feet or more than 8½ feet wide and a length of 12 to 14 feet (3.6 to 4.3 meters) depending on the angle used.
By the mid-1950s the striving for efficiency of traffic movement and the push for reducing points of conflict all but rendered angled parking a dangerous nuisance. Of particular concern were cars that parked front first toward the curb, and upon leaving backed out into oncoming traffic. Cities across the country outlawed its use and, with the surplus space, either added or widened existing travel lanes. Curb parking (ranked) replaced angled as the preferred solution of traffic engineers.
Off-Street Lots
In the 1920s, cities across America started to allocate space for parking lots that were either owned and managed privately by commercial and retail associations, or owned by public entities and maintained by private operators. Some of these lots were within downtown areas, others were located at city perimeters. One of the earliest municipal lots was constructed in Los Angeles in 1922, followed by Flint, Michigan in1924, and Chicago and Boston in 1930. In Pittsburgh in 1927, periphery lots that could handle 900 cars, sited near the Allegheny River’s edge, charged ten cents per car for those visiting or working downtown.
In 1923 the National Conference of City Planning encouraged municipalities to take planned and rational action in allocating sites for off-street parking facilities. One of the first comprehensive citywide parking plans was completed in Garden City, Long Island, in 1936. The first private facility organized, constructed, and managed by the local commerce association within a city center was in all likelihood built in Oakland, California, in 1929.