The robber called “Black Maria”

The patent application filed by Carlton Cole Magee on May 13, 1935 at United States Patent and Trademark Office filed shows a futuristic device with a dial and viewing window at the top of a pole. Magee was a lawyer, local journalist, and head of the Oklahoma City Transportation Committee. “My invention,” Magee wrote in its filing, “measures the occupancy time of a parking space that requires a time-based fee to be charged.” According to the patent, the parking meter must allow payment of a parking time depending on the coin value and clearly display the end of the parking time.

The town’s merchants had complained bitterly about declining sales because the same cars were parked all day in the available parking lots in the town centre. Traffic politician Magee came up with a remedy and announced a competition for ideas for a parking meter at the local university. The idea was not entirely new: a patent applied for seven years earlier described an electric parking meter that should have been connected to the battery of the parked car with a cable clamp. For obvious reasons, this electric watch was never built.

Magee’s idea contest at the University of Oklahoma also failed to produce the desired result, so he single-handedly invited two professors to put his idea into practice. The result was a mechanical parking timer with a clockwork whose spring had to be wound by the driver after inserting a coin. Magee did not want to use the device primarily to fill the municipal coffers, but rather to stimulate traffic flow in the city. Long-term parking must be banned from the city center and the parking spaces must be kept free for new shoppers.

The patent officers took their time with the coinwatch, a lot of time: the application was only approved after three years. But patience wasn’t Magee’s thing: Just two months after filing the patent application, the resourceful attorney had the first 175 of his new parking meters set up in Oklahoma City. The fee of five cents an hour annoyed the drivers, and soon the unloved device was called «Black Mary». Angry citizens protested against this modern “hijacking”; individual parking meters were summarily circumvented. Alone, nothing helped. Magee’s invention ended free long-term parking in Oklahoma.

A conflict of use of public space also began to arise in Europe. The economic upswing of the 1950s made cars affordable for wider segments of the population, and motorized traffic began to permanently change settlement patterns. There were 147,000 passenger cars registered in Switzerland in 1950; ten years earlier, at just 66,000, it was less than half. The many parked cars in the cities became a nuisance.

The solution came from the US, where by the end of 1951 more than a million parking meters were already doing their mechanical work. “There is something fascinating about the possibility of creating better conditions by introducing the parking meter in city centers overloaded with stationary traffic,” said Adolf Ramseyer, then head of the traffic department of the city of Basel, approving the installation of the first parking meter well meter on European scale in 1952 Floor.

Two years later, the city of Duisburg in Germany followed and installed the first 20 parking meters; In the late 1950s, mechanical parking attendants were already part of the street scene in European cities, which had long since discovered parking fees as a profitable source of money.

However, the devices were never particularly popular: «Bimne Parkingmeter ha n’ i mis Outo wölle la, but hakes Zwänzgi gha, for bim Gäld Schlitz inezla»sang the Bernese singer-songwriter Mani Matter in 1970. And it was precisely this coin slot that finally drained the parking meter – the mechanism of the coin acceptor was too delicate and too expensive to maintain.

In Europe, the definitive end of mechanical coin watches came with the introduction of the Euro on January 1, 2002 – it just wasn’t worth converting the decades-old precision devices to the new coins. Also in the parkographic pioneer city of Basel, the mechanical individual parking meters were gradually replaced by electronic collective parking meters from 2007 onwards. The latest Basel coin watches based on the legendary «Black Mary» were dismantled in 2011.