The Eight-Decade Hunt for the Perfect Parking Spot

Finding a place to put cars sparked innovation long before the app era.

Walter E. Lindsay’s 1934 patent application for a “a system of communication between distant points, at the inside and outside of a business establishment.” Credit: USPTO

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Molly Wood, executive editor of the tech news site CNET, has filmed an episode of her video series “Always On” about apps that help users find parking on city streets. Wood focuses on Streetline, a company that embeds sensors in parking spots and sends data to users, via smartphone, showing them where a spot might be available at any given moment.

Featured in the video is Kurt Buecheler, Streetline’s senior vice president for business development, explaining how the app benefits the commercial lives of cities by cutting down on the amount of time would-be customers spend circling for parking. “We’re making it easier for people to get to those merchants,” Buecheler says. “We make it really easy to get to that law firm, that flower shop or that restaurant.”

Streetline is compelling enough technology on its own. But if you’ve spent any time paying attention to the civic technology space, you’ll know that it’s also, well, familiar. People have been trying to figure out how to use apps and digital data to address parking’s challenges as long as there have been apps and digital data.

It makes you wonder, just how long have we been applying our creative energies to solving the problem of parking?

The answer, it turns out, goes at least as far back as Walter E. Lindsay. Lindsay, an inventor, applied for a patent in the United States in 1934, and his reasoning for what motivated him would sound awfully familiar to Streetline’s Buecheler:

In the congested business districts of larger towns and cities, the problem of finding parking space for automobiles in convenient vicinity of business houses is a serious handicap to the speedy and satisfactory transaction of business between such establishments and their customers.

Lindsay drilled down to what he saw as the central error in the way cities handled parking. Businesses were required to have spots out front, but there was no way for people to share them:

In most cities, police regulations provide for open spaces opposite the entrances to the buildings, into which motor vehicles may be driven to discharge their passengers. However, the vehicles may occupy such spaces only temporarily, and under no circumstances can the spaces be used for parking purposes even for a comparatively short period of time. In many instances the transaction of business requires but a few moments, notwithstanding which the customer is often compelled to walk a considerable distance from a place at which an automobile may be parked, to the establishment where his business is to be transacted, causing loss of time and other inconveniences.

Of course, poor Walter E. Lindsay lived in an era before mobile phones and digital data. So here was his solution, pictured above:

It is the principal object of the present invention to eliminate the difficulties above recited by the provision of a simple system of devices by which a customer may transact business with an attendant in a place of business from a point outside the same, without the necessity of entering the building, and, in most instances, without leaving the vehicle in which the customer is travelling. With this main object in view, the invention comprises a stand erected outside a building, preferably adjacent the curb of the street, and within sight of an attendant inside a place of business… The stand provides means for two-way communication between the customer and the attendant and means for the conveyance of small parcels in either direction.

If that looks familiar, you’re on to something. Lindsay’s invention went on to spur the creation of car-based banking, which was a pretty good thing. It might not have been the revolution in urban commerce that Lindsay had hoped for, but on top of his patent were built other inventions, from automatic food dispensers at drive-ins to toll-taking machines to street-side mail dropboxes.

Lindsay sought a better way of distributing the limited resource that parking still is today. In the intervening eight decades we’ve developed ideas about the desirability of increasing foot traffic and window shopping, but Lindsay’s invention is a reminder that we city-dwellers have been looking for good parking spaces for a very long time. And while the hunt has been long and frustrating, it’s also made us pretty creative.

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Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.

Tags: shared cityappscivic techparking

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