I was wondering this the last time I saw some pictures of a city street in the early days of the automobile. These pictures show streets lined with cars in angled parking; presently these same streets have parallel parking. I think I’ve seen pictures of several places like this, the most recent example being Cleveland. One characteristic of streets in pictures like this is that they are very wide, so I’m assuming that cars were not parked like this on narrow streets. Was parallel parking done by cars on narrower streets from the beginning? If not, when and where did it become common on city streets?
It would have been in the '50’s, after WWII, when everyone started buying and driving cars and the need for increased capacity on city streets became evident. So much so that the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) issued a directive that prohibited angle parking on federal aid roads. Most main roads thru cities were federal aid roads, so that got rid of it in many cases. That directive had a sunset clause that terminated it in the early ‘60’s, but by then the continued increase in traffic meant that the roadway became more useful for moving traffic lanes rather than storing vehicles. Cars were also getting stylishly longer, with one Lincoln model being 19 feet long. Angle parking, to operate efficiently and safely, needs two lanes behind it in each direction that has such parking. One lane being for the thru traffic and the other, nearest the angle-parked cars, for slowing, stopping, waiting, and the backing-out maneuver because of the driver’ s blind spot making the backing out inherently hazardous. Most parking-related crashes result from backing maneuvers, so parallel parking reduces that crash type. Sorry I can’t provide any e-links but hope this helps.