When it comes to parking, the socio-technical system of the public street is best understood as a commons, or an imperfectly shared common-pool resource. In a legal sense, the “public street” is not a physical place, but a right of movement – a “right of way” – imposed as an easement on private property rights; in general, municipalities do not “own” the physical property of the street. This easement is a commons meant to serve the public good. It is a publicly-controlled network for the free movement of people and goods, transported by many means: in pipes, over wires, on foot, on tracks, or on wheeled vehicles of all descriptions. Legally, governments and their agents were empowered to regulate the various uses of this easement in order to ensure the free flow of goods and people. As with all “public goods,” however, the street engenders debate over exactly who was included in the public, who was privileged to enjoy a share of the goods, and what was a just distribution.
Within this legal context, leaving one’s private property blocking the common space intended for the free movement of people and goods was largely banned before the 20th century. In 1889, an American court declared that “the highway may be a convenient place for the owner of carriages to keep them in, but the law . . . prohibits any such use of the public streets.” This decision echoed the long-standing philosophy of the road by stating that “the primary use of the highway is . . . the passing and repassing of the public, and it is entitled to unobstructed and unoccupied use of the entire width of the highway for that purpose.” Before the 20th century, horse-drawn carriages and wagons could not be abandoned in the street; their storage (and the feeding and maintenance of their horse-power) necessitated an entire industry of private livery stables and yards. Leaving one’s personal property unattended in public space was as unthinkable as storing one’s suitcases in the lobby of city hall. But the booming popularity of personal automobiles led to widespread public acceptance of leaving idled vehicles on the grassy, park-like verges of public roads. “Parking” is just another word for “temporary street storage of private property at public expense.”
As Peter Norton has argued, the arrival of the private automobile hit cities as a crisis of outrage and public safety, quickly demanding response from authorities. Early-20th-century metropolitan police forces resisted the responsibilities of traffic and parking enforcement, seeing both as discrediting their goals of professionalization through crime fighting. Eric Monkennen advanced this periodization of police history, summarizing an argument for the turn-of-the-century shift from prioritizing a “public order” mission to prioritizing the more rhetorically-persuasive mission of “crime control.” As Monkennen puts it, “by the end of World War I, police were in the business of crime control. Other city- or state-run agencies had taken over their former noncrime control activities.” Emerging at the exact moment that they were trying to distance themselves from day-to-day management of public order, the problems of “traffic” management were unwelcome to police forces.