This fellow lives three doors from me. All of us have this issue — I’m sorry I was out of town for the demonstration or I would have been there. Read about it here.
The story is this: If you have a large parkway in front of your house, the driveway goes through it and on to your property. The state, 75 years ago designated that as a “parkway, or apron” and the city said that it was illegal to park in an apron, between the sidewalk and the street. The city has not been enforcing this rule until some busybody named Don Shoup raised hell in the area around UCLA. It seems people were parking in the apron and blocking the sidewalks (the parkway was only about four feet wide and naturally cars didn’t fit and blocked the sidewalk). This became and ADA lawsuit issue and so on one day the wizards at the department of transportation decided to enforce the law and ticket all cars so parked, blocking the sidewalk or not.
This began to creep out into the entire city and areas like mine, and all hell broke lose. IN my area the parkway/apron is about 25 feet wide and cars can easily fit without blocking the sidewalk or being in the street. Remember, although the city owns the land, I have to take care of it, water the grass, and keep the pavement mended at my expense. I just can’t park on it. By the way, we are talking about parking on the driveway, not on the grass.
Of course, the city could have simply ticketed those cars that were across the sidewalk, but as Shoup said, the city has never been known for doing things by halves. What has to happen now is that the DOT has to do a study, probably taking a year. Then the city council has to take it up, and that will take another six months. My councilman is the head of the transportation committee that handles this, but they don’t want to make any mistakes. Sigh.
I have never been able to figure out how laws are passed. This is a most complex process to handle a simple problem. Why couldn’t they simply instruct the DOT to ticket only those cars blocking the sidewalk in the interim and then go down the two year path. At the end, if the city council was convinced that the law was a good one (remember this hadn’t been enforced for 50 years), then so be it. I can certainly understand the concern about blocking the sidewalk, but the rest, balderdash.
JVH
