When the article earlier this week on changes to downtown parking for 2025 was posted to reddit, the conversation there was not dominated by complaint. Maybe the tide
is finally turning! Several commenters were aware of the difference
between a parking supply problem, which we don't have, and a parking
management problem, which we do have. Our parking discourse is getting
better. That's a striking change from a decade ago, when petitioners forced the City to retreat from parking reform.
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| Front page earlier this week |
Our approach to parking is historical. Different times call for different measures; what seems best for one era is backwards in another. Sometimes what seems best is based on an outright error. The discourse is always changing. One theme from 100 years ago was a call for head-in parking. Back-in parking had been the norm.
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| December 10th, 1924 |
You could substitute "paid parking" for "back-in parking" in these discussions!
Salem is held old fashioned. Present system of parking automobiles obsolete...."I was formerly in favor of the [free parking] such as we now have in Salem, but after traveling in 30 states and hundreds of cities, I find everywhere the [paid] system of parking."
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| December 11th, 1924 |
The SJ piece briefly alluded to a half-century of free parking, but merely implied that we had had paid parking previously. (It might have been worth a longer discussion of the previous eras of parking, as well as data on actual current occupancy rates in the parkades.)
We have had yet other changes too. There is nothing immutable about our parking arrangements!
You may recall Commerce Secretary Hoover's report on traffic safety and zoning, which briefly touched on some of those costs and problems, already known way back in the day, of "day storage space for automobiles." (Though they also asserted streets were primarily for moving traffic, and deny the placemaking and value-creation role of streets distinct from roads.)
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| In 1924 they understood the problem of car storage! |
They noted "automobile storage...adequate to accommodate a very general use of the private passenger automobile cannot reasonably be provided."
The voids in our downtown testify to this. Even when buildings were not demolished by design, and were demolished after fire, the incentives did not align for rebuilding and instead aligned for car storage or car service as a drive-thru. Some buildings were straight-up demolished for car storage also. (The Mill's just ended "History in Rubble" exhibit missed an opportunity to talk about autoism and demolition.)
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| Our appetite for parking = so many demolitions and voids (See "Parking Craters" from 2016 for more and a note on "History in Rubble") |
Here in Salem we can see the shift over a decade from 1913 to the mid-1920s in the way we used street space. These images are from about a block and a half of State Street between Liberty and High.
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| Multi-modal street with buggy, bike, auto, and streetcar (State Street from High, c.1913, via OHS) |
Though it's probable there was a parade or some other event to juice the
number of people downtown (the opening of the Union Street Bridge in
March of 1913 is a candidate), this scene from State Street at High shows the
multi-modal space.
There are horse-drawn carts and buggies, automobiles, streetcars implied by the tracks, people on bike, people on foot, all kinds of way people using the road and sidewalk. A key was low speed, including car speed.
A view from about a decade later of the same intersection rotated nearly 180 degrees and pictured from above shows a very different use of space. There are more parked cars than people. The streetcar shows a clear hazard zone on its right from people getting on and off in the middle of the street. Impatient drivers unwilling to wait for passengers or for a more polite driver in front of them could zip around and run into a person.
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| Public bathrooms, streetcar, back-in parking (State and High c.1925, via OHS) |
You can also see the stairways and ventilation shaft for the "comfort station," a public restroom below grade at the Courthouse.
A third view (compare also to the header image for our Strong Towns group), also shows the back-in parking, as well as the buildings now lost between the Gray Belle (Fork-Forty today) and the corner (now the Key Bank building). Behind the sign for Scotch Mills, the building in between it and the Gray Belle was a music store, and that is now the bank's drive-thru. The Chinese Medicine Co. is above the Scotch Mill storefront.
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| South side of State street between Fork-Forty (Gray Belle) and the Guardian Building (State and Liberty, via OHS) |
Even though it was increasingly out of favor, back-in parking was safer as drivers returned to the travel lane. When drivers pull out of the stall, they can see what is in front of them, and from their left also see oncoming cars and other users of the road. It is something we should consider more today!
Here parking is a perennial theme over the years, and now is cyclical it seems:
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