By LBPOSTSports.com columnist Ryan Thies
Some students at Cal State Long Beach got a nasty surprise last week – the same surprise that many volleyball fans found out the previous Friday and Saturday night: eastbound on Atherton, outside of the Pyramid, is now a No Parking zone.
Actually “no parking” would imply that the city painted the curb red, put up plenty of signs, and fully marked the area; which would be a reasonable expectation for an area where students have been parking for years.
Instead that area is now a “bike lane,” and a much needed one at that. As anyone that has driven on 2nd Street knows, the city has been making very visible efforts to help the city’s bikers. These concessions to cyclists – along with the new hybrid buses and the mayor’s electric car – let Long Beach waive a green flag as an environmentally-friendly city. But when you consider that cyclists have been asking for that bike lane for years, that the lane has been in the works for months, and that the city has made minimal effort to warn cars, suddenly the cynic in me starts to wonder if the timing was intentional.
Everyday during that first week of school, at least 50 cars per day received the $46 tickets; which rapidly piled up into a hefty chunk of change. Why are so many still parking in the area? Because there is practically nothing to tell them they shouldn’t. East of the Carpenter center, which is also no parking, the curb is painted red and there are “No Parking” signs every 50 feet. Between the Carpenter Center and the Pyramid, the curb is painted red in bus zones, with street sweeping signs (although those are nearly faded beyond readability), and there is now a new white-painted area for loading. So where does the No Parking stretch begin? Your guess is as good as mine.
To find out, I spoke with Cal State Long Beach parking authority, who were very quick to point out that the new No Parking designation was the City’s doing, not theirs. So I spoke with the Long Beach Traffic & Engineering department in City Hall. They too couldn’t tell me when the ticketing began, or where the actual No Parking section begins, but they did tell me something interesting: the standard for posting No Parking signs is 50 feet apart, but in some stretches they can be as far as 80 to 100 feet apart.
So in the 600-ft stretch where people were ticketed, just how many No Parking signs were there? Three. You read that right, in a place where people have parked for years, with no change to the curb color, there are half as many signs as usual.
Why would the City paint the curb for a new loading zone, without painting the rest as No Parking? Is it possible that during a recession, when money is tight for the city, they purposely left the area vague with the explicit intention of creating more parking tickets? Is it possible they agreed to a bike lane now with this in mind? Is the timing – right before school came back – premeditated? To put it another way, is the city using environmentalism as a guise to generate parking tickets?