Definition
In municipal law and land use, parking refers to a strip or area of land set aside within or adjacent to a public street or roadway that is intended to remain open and unbuilt, typically beautified with turf, trees, plantings, or similar landscaping. The term describes a designed green or ornamental buffer — not a space for vehicle storage — usually located in one of three positions: in the median of a street, between the building line and the sidewalk, or between the sidewalk and the driveway.
Note on scope: This municipal law definition is distinct from the modern colloquial and traffic-regulatory sense of "parking" as the temporary stopping or leaving of a motor vehicle. The dictionary entry here reflects the older, landscape-oriented usage codified in early municipal ordinances and property descriptions.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Present participle and gerund of "park"; in everyday use, the act of temporarily stopping and leaving a vehicle in a designated or available location.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To enclose in a park; to bring together in a park; also used in military contexts for assembling artillery or wagons in a compact arrangement.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is historically significant. The legal term, as recorded in Black's supplemental entries, carries a spatial and municipal planning sense — a landscaped strip of land — that has no meaningful overlap with the modern vehicle-storage meaning most researchers will bring to the term. A researcher encountering "parking" in an early twentieth-century municipal ordinance, deed description, or zoning document should not assume the vehicle-related meaning applies. The word may instead be describing a designated green corridor or ornamental land feature.
Common Confusion
The dominant modern meaning of "parking" — the temporary stationing of motor vehicles — overwhelms the older municipal law sense in contemporary legal research. Researchers working in early twentieth-century city planning records, street improvement ordinances, subdivision plats, or property dispute cases may encounter "parking" used exclusively in the landscape-strip sense. Conflating the two meanings risks fundamental misreading of the source material. The vehicle-related regulatory sense of parking, governed today by traffic codes and municipal ordinances, is a separate body of law that developed alongside the rise of the automobile and should be treated as a distinct legal concept.
Why It Matters in Research
Temporal trap: The landscape-strip meaning of "parking" was the operative legal usage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As automobile use expanded, the vehicle-stationing sense rapidly displaced it in popular and regulatory language. Researchers working with sources from roughly 1880 through the 1930s should be alert to which meaning is operative in context. After mid-century, the vehicle sense dominates almost universally in legal materials.
Municipal ordinance research: Early city planning documents, street-grade ordinances, and subdivision regulations frequently specify "parking" as a required land feature — a mandate for landscaping, not vehicle accommodation. Misreading these provisions as vehicle-related will distort analysis of historical land use obligations.
Property descriptions and deeds: Deeds and plats from this era may include references to parking strips as part of the property description or as encumbrances on use. These carry real legal consequences for title and land use that have nothing to do with motor vehicles.
Corpus connections: Researchers working in municipal law, early zoning history, or urban planning law should treat this entry as a flag to slow down when the term appears in pre-1940 materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) Supplemental defines parking in the municipal law sense as a strip of land in or adjacent to a street, kept in a park-like state and beautified with natural elements. The entry cites Downing v. Des Moines as authority. This definition is consistent with the era's broader use of "park" as both a noun (a public ornamental space) and a verb (to lay out land in a park-like manner). The historical dictionaries reflect a world in which "parking" was a land use and aesthetic designation, not a traffic regulation concept. What the historical sources do not address — because it had not yet emerged as a significant legal category — is vehicle parking law, which developed almost entirely through twentieth-century traffic codes, administrative regulation, and municipal ordinance outside the scope of the classical legal dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
The landscape-strip meaning was used across American municipalities but was never uniform in its application or precise boundaries. Some jurisdictions used "parking strip," "planting strip," or "tree lawn" interchangeably with "parking" for the same concept. Researchers should check local ordinance terminology, as the same physical feature may carry different names in different cities.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Federal Public Lands — Management (BLM, Forest Service, National Parks), The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia — relevant for broader context on public land designation, green space, and the legal frameworks governing land set aside for non-development purposes.