I was just watching the hilarious movie Johnny Dangerously, and there’s a scene where Joe Piscopo’s character parks his car in a spot and his passenger says, “this is a handicapped spot!” To which he responds, “I have a handicap. I’m psychotic.” The movie is set in the 30s. It got me thinking, “did they have handicapped spots back then? When did they first have handicapped parking?”
If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say the 70s. No specific reason, it just seems right to me. How far off the mark am I?
Speaking only about the US, newspaper accounts show about 1974. But since this was not a National thing until 1990, it was instituted piecemeal by Cities and States. But I’ll keep looking.
To add to my post, I can find a 1966 PA. newspaper article showing that the State instituted handicapped license plates, allowing someone to park in a spot for longer than the law allowed. But nothing to indicate that they had the more modern version of a marked space.
Little known fact: the idea of handicapped parking was first conceived in the 1960s in Canada. Spaces were marked with a large letter “G”, which meant “gimp”. However, French-Canadians protested because the letter symbolized an English word. Thus, the wheelchair symbol was born. The symbol was designed in a way to allow easy modification of already-painted “G” spaces, converting the letter into a wheelchair with a few extra lines.
Seriously, the earliest mention of handicapped parking in planning literature that I’ve seen dates back to the early 1970s. Through the 1970s, requirements for compact car spaces and designated handicapped-accessible spaces were increasingly added to local zoning codes. Over time, compact car requirements were silently dropped from most codes, and accessible parking availability became mandated by state and federal law.
AFAIK, no zoning codes that I’m aware of require special parking spaces for pregnant women, senior citizens, and so on.