From the Roundtable: Get-A-Load of these parking schemes, past and present

Morning Roundtable” every Sunday at 8:15 a.m. on kfru. He can be reached at [email protected].

The GetAbout Columbia schemes seem to come in waves. The latest “experiment” in the otherwise laudable and ambitious $22 million project is destined to become an object of community derision.

GetAbout has proposed re-striping Ash Street between Seventh and Ninth streets so drivers can back their vehicles into the parking spaces and hopefully reduce their chances of “dooring,” the term for accidents caused by drivers who park parallel with the street and open their doors in front of cyclists. From the standpoint of safety to cyclists averse to somersaulting over their handlebars, maybe it’s worth trying – again.

Ninety years ago, backing in was the practice on a number of downtown streets.

This is a 1922 photograph of South Ninth Street looking north toward the Cherry Street intersection. Flimsy looking Flivvers are backed in diagonally between the former Virginia Building, now the Atkins City Centre, on the left and the old Hall Theatre, now Panera Bread, on the right side of the picture. I suspect the principal reason the vehicles were backed in was so the drivers had access to the crank used to start the engine on those primitive machines. Electric starters had been only recently introduced.

This photograph illustrates how parking was arranged on Broadway when it was part of the transcontinental Old Trails Road, the predecessor to Interstate 70. With Broadway's vexing downtown congestion, one wonders whether another experiment might be in order to park vehicles in the middle of the street. Of course it wouldn't work today because that territory has become a de facto delivery zone. Yet with recollections of the abortive downtown "Loop" some 30 years ago, and now a possible fling with back-in parking, who knows what might go back on the table for consideration.

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