The city of Boston has not raised the price of parking tickets in over 10 years, but that changed this summer. In July, Boston increased both the cost and the enforcement of the most common parking violations, and the city expects to rake in $1.5 million more than this period last year.
All that bright orange on Boston’s windshields got us curious about parking’s past and future.
When Parking Had To Do With Parks
Michele Richmond is a landscape architect at a firm called Weber Thompson. She’s the person who sits in city planning meetings and advocates for the trees.
A handful of summers ago, when Richmond was a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, she was doing historical research on public green spaces and she kept seeing the word “parking.” This was surprising, because the documents were created well before cars existed.
Confused, Richmond decided to look the word up. She asked a Harvard librarian for an old dictionary from the mid-1800s.
“It actually said: To enclose in a park or to create a park on the side of a street,” recalls Richmond. “I was like, ‘Wow, that is not at all what I think of as parking today.’”
Parking used to mean just what it sounds like: creating a park. It denoted trees and bushes running along a roadway. Back in the day, this wasn’t just a skinny tree here and there. Richmond says there were often many rows of trees.
Pretty quickly the roadside parks were used for more than just walking and picnics. People would “tie their horses and buggies to trees when they're out in stores or visiting friends,” says Richmond.
Horses would enjoy the shade in the park, and soon enough that became known as ‘parking.’ Then, cars burst onto the national stage.
“In 1900, there are about 8,000 registered cars; by 1930 there are 23 million,” says Richmond. “So that's a huge change. And just as people would tether horses to a tree, they would leave their cars next to the trees because that's what they had always done. “
Soon, Richmond says, horse parking went away, and they were cutting down trees to make room for more car parking. From 1910 to 1930 — in just 20 short years — the definition of parking changed.
And things may be changing once again.
‘Future-Proofing’ Parking Garages
“We've all been inundated with these articles about automated vehicles,” says Peter Merwin, an architect at a firm called Gensler.
With ridesharing companies like Lyft and Uber — and eventually self-driving cars — just dropping passengers off and cruising on to the next ride, Merwin thinks we may be heading toward a future where far fewer cars need to be parked.
But estimates suggest that there are already some 800 million parking spots across the country. Currently, Merwin says, “so much real estate is tied up in parking.”
That real estate may eventually be freed up, but in the near future, parking — especially in Boston — is still needed. So Merwin has created a structure that can be used to park cars now but can be converted into something else easily. He says there are a few key factors.
First, think about those ramps in garages, where you park on a slight slope.
“The problem with them is they can’t be reused for anything other than parking, or maybe skateboarding,” Merwin says. He argues that new parking garages should have flat floors and a ramp in just one corner.
Second, he says those low ceilings will not cut it. He wants 15 feet from one floor to the next. “It works for retail. It works for loft residential. It works for a state-of-the-art office space,” Merwin says.
He calls this ‘future-proofing’ parking garages, and uses these strategies on basically every project he works on.
Boston’s Parking
When Boston decided to hike their parking fines, they weren’t necessarily thinking about autonomous vehicles or about going back to the days when parking meant planting trees. But they were thinking about the future.
The city says revenue from the increased fines and enforcement will go to implementing Mayor Walsh's Go Boston 2030 plan, which includes creating bus lanes, bike lanes, and better pedestrian networks.
So maybe the future of Boston will be more like its past — a city with fewer cars and a different kind of parking.
