Until the mid-1950s, stopping or parking a vehicle on the streets of Paris was considered detrimental to public order, and therefore prohibited [1; 2; 3]. Less than a decade later, cars had become an integral part of urban life, regulation had changed, and various users (residents, visitors, commuters, etc.) started competing for limited on-street parking [1; 4]. Residential parking, whether on- or off-street, has been the subject of much recent research, whereas the use of on-street parking by commercial activities has been understudied. This paper focuses on the public provision of dedicated on-street parking spaces for select commercial services (including public passenger transport, taxis, cash transport, goods delivery and, lately, car-sharing as well as electric vehicle charging), its historical raison d’être, and its more recent role in supporting mobility innovations. Based on an analysis of legal and administrative archives, we chronicle policy developments regarding the public provision of dedicated on-street parking to commercial services in Paris, and subsequently discuss the hypothesis of an underlying qualitative ‘hierarchy’ among the use purposes of this resource [3]. Then, using statistics from the City of Paris, we discuss past evolutions in the amount of dedicated on-street parking spaces provided to several categories of eligible services. Finally, based on an analysis of recent developments in car-sharing operations in the Greater Paris region, we discuss the role of on-street parking provision in supporting the development of car-sharing services.