A handful of Harrison Avenue residents are calling for police to intervene with a neighbor whose habit of parking a motor vehicle in the street overnight is creating a safety hazard, they say, as well as violating a local ordinance.
Already a heavily used cut-through for motorists between South Avenue and Main Street, Harrison Avenue is reduced to a single lane in the area of the vehicle when it’s parked in the street, and it “completely blocks your line of sight day and night, so you have to come to a stop to go around it constantly,” Susan Lynch told members of the Police Commission Wednesday night.
“We all have driveways to park in and we don’t use the street as a parking lot,” Lynch, joined by about five other neighbors, told the commission at its regular monthly meeting, held in the Training Room at the New Canaan Police Department. “I think everybody consciously does not park on the street day and night so it is a safe street. Because it is a cut-through street. Lots of people use it. We are conscious of the fact that people go up and down, and we don’t wan to be parked out there for buses, and for many reasons.”
Citing 10 years of data that says there’s no safety issue on Harrison (the problem has been going on for about 18 months, Lynch said), some members of the department’s command staff gave pause at the idea of singling out an individual in what amounted to a neighborhood squabble.
Ultimately, however, the commissioners urged police to enforce Section 58-10 of the Town Code, which prohibits overnight parking: “No vehicle shall be parked overnight in any street or public place. Any vehicle parked over 30 minutes between the hours of 1:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. shall be considered to have been parked overnight.”
Commissioner Paul Foley said: “It seems as though there is a law on the books” and “I think it is up to us to enforce it.”
“So let’s enforce the statutes on the books, not create new laws or regulations,” he said.
Police responded that the enforcement could not be selectively targeted at one motorist. (The day after the meeting, on Thursday, police cited the snowy forecast for New Canaan and highway department’s job of keeping public roads clear in urging residents to avoid parking on the street.)
During the meeting, Police Capt. John DiFederico said he had looked at the history of overnight accidents on Harrison Avenue and “there is no data to support that there is a safety issue.”
“I contacted the Highway Department and they have had no issues that they are aware of any different from any other street in town where a vehicle sometimes parks in a snowstorm and it limits the ability to plow, so Harrison is no different than any other street.”
Officers typically use their discretion in enforcing the overnight public parking restriction, looking mostly at vehicles parked in lots, DiFederico said.
“This is more of a neighbor issue than an actual parking safety issue and I don’t think we should be utilized to get into a neighbor issue,” he said. “It’s one neighbor.”
Capt. Vincent DeMaio noted that New Canaan has seen very little snowfall this year and that normally the ordinance is enforced November to April when the town typically sees snow.
“Because we haven’t had that, we are not enforcing it,” DeMaio said. “This is kind of the reverse of what we normally hear. Most people complain that they are getting tickets, not that we are not giving them.”
Lynch noted that if everyone on Harrison decided to park in the street, it would create a serious problem and police would not be able to use the same discretion in allowing overnight parking for one.
“We all have extra cars for sure but we all have driveways and we use our discretion to park safely in the driveway,” Lynch said. “It would be a nuisance if we all parked in the street. Which we don’t want to do, obviously.”
The offending motorist is a resident of Harrison Avenue who has not been responsive to the neighbors’ pleas and another homeowner on the street, Kathy Paladino, told the commission that active home construction Harrison, with multiple slow-moving vehicles pulling in and out of lots, has exacerbated the problem.
“Here’s the killer: They have a big, wide driveway,” Paladino said.
Another point of view from a Harrison Ave. resident – When the road was first repaved and people were speeding up and down, a traffic calming expert told me the best way to slow traffic down was to park on the street. Maybe on street parking actually makes the road safer.
Here, Here, Beth. I too reside on Harrison, and my biggest worry about the repaving was that the double yellow line would be restripped, inducing drivers to treat the road as a speedway. That didn’t happen, thank goodness, but we still get our share of speeding cut-through traffic, most often in the morning before school. It turns out that the best defense has actually been the on-street parking on the lower half of the street. Unsightly maybe, but unless other traffic calming measures are taken, it seems to be the most effective option against insensitive drivers.