First city to put in parking meters shifting from coin to digital devices

OKLAHOMA CITY — The city where parking meters were born more than eight decades ago is phasing out the last of the coin-gobbling contraptions that reshaped America’s downtowns in favor of computerized models seen in many other places.

Parking meters came into the picture as the streetcar age gave way to the era of the automobile, remaking urban transportation and the way civic planners and business owners imagined commerce centers for more than three generations. But old-school analog meters have been disappearing as cities have been investing in the digital ones that take plastic, along with coins.

The changing technology has meant Oklahoma City’s parking meters have been operating on borrowed time. Their guts date to the 1960s and 1970s, and many companies that once serviced them have long been out of business.

Motorists’ mostly hate-hate relationship with the parking meter began in 1935, when the first one sprouted here. The collective rage, like most things, worked its way into popular culture.

Paul Newman’s title character in the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke lops the heads off parking meters lining a nearly deserted downtown drag.

“It was an iconic opening scene; it was this act of rebellion,” said Bob Blackburn, executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society.