New York car parking ban

Two things happened during the week that threw my mind back to a day and an evening in San Francisco – oh, I was going to say some years ago but I'd better come clean at the start and say it was 1949.

An old college friend of mine, an Englishman who had never been to the United States and whom I hadn't seen for years, sent me a cable in the early spring to say he was going on a business trip to Australia and New Zealand and he would be going home via San Francisco and New York. Was there any chance that I might meet him in San Francisco and show him a little of the West? 

Well, in those days I was a foreign correspondent for a British paper and when you're 3,000 miles away from your boss, you can find pressing reasons to go almost anywhere you want. But I was a fairly law-abiding character and I wasn't going to burden my editor with exorbitant expenses at a time when Britain was bowed down under the burden of austerity. 

But for years I'd been biding my time, waiting for the magic date, 1949, because that would be the hundredth anniversary of the California Gold Rush and I'd plotted for some time to do a series of articles on it. Datelined, of course, from the places where it happened. Coloma, by the American River, where a young Scotsman first ran into hard, shiny peas that turned out to be gold. And some of the more famous diggings: Jackson, Chinese Diggings, Poverty Hill, and so on. 

I thought I'd get out there well before my returning friend. He was a raincoat manufacturer and was doing his bit for what was then bravely known as the export drive. I wrote a long and perhaps needlessly cunning letter to my editor, a shrewd little Lancashire man named A. P. Wadsworth. I laid out elaborate reasons why we should beat everybody in covering the Gold Rush. I think we'd just beaten the Times in covering the birth of Alfred the Great. Never mind that it was 500 years too late. I said it was essential to do the story from California, of course, // (...) all this fuss and contrivance seemed necessary to me because there was a fateful foreign aid bill pending in the Senate and the editor might well think it shocking for me to be anywhere else but Washington. 

Well, I needn't have been at such pains to try and deceive him. He was always un-fooled and he was a man of few words. He cabled back, 'Go California! Why do we employ Reuters?' So off I went and dug around the foothills of the High Sierra, wrote my six pieces and was ready to receive my friend. 

All I remember from that first trip is the first day. I arranged a party for him with some San Francisco friends. He came in tired, he took a nap, he was ready for action, and on the way to the party he made two observations. One was what a marvellous thing it is that you can cross the Pacific Ocean in just over 26 hours. The other was his astonishment as we walked up and down the hills of the city at seeing the gutters of the streets lined with cars, motor cars. First, he decided America was even more prosperous than he'd imagined. Thirty years ago, remember, a car was not a normal amenity of ordinary British folk and those who had one put it in a garage! Well, I told him that this was a normal sight in any American city and then he thought everybody must be going to a party. And I said something like, 'No, it's simply getting so that there are not enough garages to house all the cars. And people simply leave them out on the streets, parked, bumper to bumper.' The parking meter, by the way, was not then a standard device for making revenue out of necessity. 

Well, there's nothing very blinding about these observations, that you could cross the Pacific in 26 hours and that the streets of American cities were lined with cars, but the naiveté of these remarks certainly takes you back, doesn't it? Today he would have crossed the Pacific in nine, ten hours and every street from Edinburgh to Tokyo is choked with cars. If I were still a schoolmaster, I would allow the class a decent pause for reflection before putting the question, 'What two things happened in America this past week that are recalled by the observations of that visiting Englishman?' 

We will skip the IQ test and I will tell you what some smarties may have already guessed. At the last minute, the British and Americans came to an agreement and, after all, British planes will go on landing in the United States and American planes will go on landing in Britain. 

Now, to guess the relevance of the street parking remark, you'd have to be a New Yorker listening to me far from home, not a New Yorker who's been here in the past month or so. Not to be over mysterious, let's take that up first. 

Last Tuesday, a court order went into effect in this city prohibiting parking during business hours in midtown, that is to say south of 59th Street. The original action was brought by a group of environmentalists known as the Friends of the Earth. They want New York City to begin to set some standards to free the air of pollution from car exhausts and the like. They won, I imagine, because they had the backing of other environmentalists, but more seriously of the federal government. The government's Environmental Protection Agency, which passes on any violation of the environment – strip mining, destroying forest lands, pouring smoke into the air from factory chimneys – has an administrator appointed for each big city and the man who takes care of New York came down on the side of the court. He said that New York has no anti-pollution plan of its own because New York State has not done enough by way of inspecting cars and trucks for exhaust emission. 

Well, this remark miffed the governor of the state and, on Wednesday, Governor Carey took his stand alongside the mayor of New York City, Mayor Beame, who's in an understandable dither about the court order because he maintains that to ban parking for a couple of miles or so across the whole width of Manhattan island during business hours would wreak terrible economic vengeance on the city. As no doubt it would. 

The moralists, of course, are being heard from. They say that nothing is more wasteful or lamentable in the cities of the western world than the morning invasion of thousands and thousands of cars containing each one sleepy driver and the evening exodus of the same. They say that people develop muscle collapse from using their cars too much, that everybody would be healthier if they walked to the nearest bus stop or railway station or tube and used public transport. And that people who live right inside the cities ought to try walking to work, to improve their circulation and strengthen their characters. 

All this is very true but the fact is that public transport has declined and rotted in proportion to the vast increase in the sale of automobiles over the past 30 years. Trains are going to pot and their service has been drastically cut because people use the motorways and because most of the goods that are carried across the whole continent go by truck – hence the iron grip on the economy held by the Teamsters. 

Well, by now there must be thousands of businesses, hundreds of businesses in New York – clothing is the big New York product, clothing, food, leather, books, office furniture, building, everything to do with the service trades – hundreds of businesses that would collapse if the employees, actually most of whom live in bedroom suburbs of New York that reach south into New Jersey, north up the Hudson and 50 miles or more out on to Long Island, if those cruising employees were to ditch their cars. And when they get here, there are never, and never will be, enough garages for them to squeeze into. So, like most big cities, Manhattan has an elaborate system of parking. Alternate day parking on one side of the street, then the other, then metered parking during business hours, tow-away zones, so on and so on. 

New Yorkers and the itinerant New Yorkers who work here and live elsewhere might well have their characters improve if they gave up the motor car but they'd soon find themselves with strong characters and no jobs. It is a problem, of course, everywhere in the world but the sudden imposition of a court ban, which is being appealed, on daytime parking in the middle of Manhattan has set off such a howl of pain from the city fathers and such warnings of economic collapse – well, it just shows how desperately we're all locked in to a smelly, unhealthy, makeshift system for which practically no big city was ever designed. 

The other point was about the marvellous speed and comfort of modern air travel. The only people who chronically complain are people who fly a great deal and, once in a while, run into trouble, a stalled engine, a storm over their destined city, which delays things for several hours. But last week a shockwave passed over the thousands and thousands of Americans who expected this week or next and beyond to fly to England. Most of us didn't hear about the troubled negotiations until the deadline was on us and I swear that nobody outside the aviation industry could have told you what the Bermuda Agreement was – signed in 1946 and it has governed British-American flights for a fairly smooth 30 years. 

Well, suddenly travel agents were calling people all across the country and telling them that to get to London they'd be flown first to Paris, or to Amsterdam, or to Montreal and then Ireland and transferred to 'available' carriers. The prospect of 'unavailable' carriers popped into our nightmares. And then, as usual, in the nick of time, it was settled. I imagine millions of dollars had already been spent on setting up staff for the dreadful contingency. 

The poor passengers could only look on and say, 'Why, in all such negotiations, must it always be the nick of time before a palpable absurdity is avoided?' It's a question that perhaps poker players might be able to answer. But somebody, some commission should examine the problem; how to eliminate the childish element in the negotiations of grown men who sit down and bargain for six months, or more, and then grow up and settle things only in the last hour before the dreadful deadline?

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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