■ Oklahoma City, where parking meters began, modernizes its system.

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 analogue 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.

“The companies just plain and simple don’t support the technology anymore,” says Cory Hubert, Oklahoma City’s parking services manager.

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.

As automobiles became more common, downtown traffic jams irked merchants. Store owners complained that most of the cars parked near their storefronts were owned by people who worked downtown, alienating potential customers.

Commerce won out, and the parking meter was born, in part, to keep traffic moving.

Millions began springing up and cities came to rely on the steady revenue from the meters — and the fines for failing to pay— to pad coffers.

Those fines aren’t going away. Nor are Oklahoma City’s five meter readers, much to the chagrin of Marina Lozano, 20, a barista who says “they’re so ruthless.”