Parking

PARKING HISTORY

The first parking summons in Britain was issued against a man named William Marshall on November 25, 1896. His summons was later dropped, as people were unsure of the regulations governing "horseless carriages".

The world's first multi-storey car park was opened at 6 Denman Street, central London by The City & Suburban Electric Carriage Company. The car park had seven floors, space for 100 vehicles and an electric elevator to move the vehicles between floors.

The earliest known multi-storey car park in America was built in 1918 for the Hotel La Salle at 215 West Washington Street in the West Loop area of downtown Chicago.

In 1927 Colonel Frederick Lucas and his wife rented some land near White City, London and begun operating a car park. The venture was the foundation of his company, National Car Parks.

The international parking sign was first designed for the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam.

The underground car park has now been a part of the British way of life ever since the South Coast resort of Hastings built the first one in 1931.

The world’s first parking meter, Park-O-Meter No. 1, was installed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on July 16, 1935. It was designed by Oklahoma State University engineering professors Holger George Thuesen and Gerald A. Hale who had begun working on the device two years earlier at the request of Oklahoma City, lawyer and newspaper publisher Carl C. Magee.

Parking meter ca. 1940

In 1960, New York City hired its first crew of "meter maids"; all were women. It was not until 1967 that the first man was hired.

The first traffic wardens in the UK hit the London streets on September 19, 1960 and had the power to issue £2 fines. The first ticket issued was slapped on a Ford Popular belonging to Dr Thomas Creighton, who was answering an emergency call at a West End hotel. The ticket was subsequently cancelled.

A total of 344 parking tickets were issued by London’s traffic wardens on their first day of operation in 1960 — each for £2.

"Meter maid" in Stockholm, 

In 1983 a Mercedes in Sloane Street became the first illegally parked car to be clamped in central London.

In 2008, the city of Chicago entered into a 75-year lease agreement with a private company called Chicago Parking Meters LLC (CPM), which is owned by a consortium led by Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and includes Allianz Capital Partners and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. CPM paid the city a lump sum of $1.2 billion for the rights to collect revenue from the city's 36,000 parking meters. These parking meters generate about $200 million in revenue annually.

In 2009, Seoul, South Korea, implemented parking spaces reserved for women to make the city more "lady-friendly."

FUN PARKING FACTS

You can squeeze eight motorbikes in the same parking space as a car.

Lotta Sjolin, a Swede who collects parking meters, was last recorded as owning 292 meters from around the world.

UPS trucks get about 15,000 parking tickets a month in New York City.

North Korea's diplomatic mission to the UN has 1,300 unpaid New York City parking tickets going back to the 1990s, owing more than $156,000.

The city of Houston, Texas has a program where they train citizens to write tickets for handicap parking violations. After taking a course in proper procedure, you are given the authority to ticket anyone you see parked in a handicap spot without a placard.

Drivers in New York City spend an average of 107 hours per year searching for parking at a cost of $2,243/driver in wasted time, fuel and emissions.

The US parking spaces take up about 25,000 square miles of land nationwide, an area roughly the size of the state of West Virginia.

n the United States, there are as many as six parking spaces for every car.

In China some parking lots have spaces reserved for female parking. These spaces are wider and make parking easier and reduces accidents.

Source Daily Mail