Diagonal parking spaces like these on 2nd Street in Alamitos Beach will be replaced with 90-degree, conventional parking spaces under the pilot program. Photo: Asia Morris
Over 100 new parking spaces are scheduled for the parking impacted community of Alamitos Beach after some maneuvering by traffic engineers and funding from Second District Councilwoman Jeannine Pearce’s office have provided the means to ease the dearth of spots near downtown Long Beach.
The affected areas lie on 1st and 2nd Streets between Cherry and Alamitos Avenues where searching for a parking spot, especially in the evening hours, seem somewhat impossible at times. The addition of some 130 new parking spots were made by removing the 60-degree head-in parking spaces as well as some parallel parking spaces and replacing them with more conventional 90-degree stalls.
Pearce, who is using about $30,000 from her office’s “Divide by Nine” funds—money split between the nine council districts and reserved for purposes of benefiting the community—said that the parking improvements stemmed out the Broadway Corridor re-visioning plan.
“When we talked about Broadway we tried to find as many ways possible to increase parking and we were not able to do that on Broadway itself, but now that we’re adding the protective bike lanes on Broadway it gave us the opportunity to do that [add parking] on First and Second,” Pearce said.
The spots will be implemented as part of a pilot program that will introduce the first 90-degree parking spaces in a residential area in the city. The spots are expected to be completed as early as January.
Pearce said spending tax dollars on parking is a good cause, but it’s not the sole source that she wants to continue to rely on in the future. While admitting that tax dollars will undoubtedly be used in the future to address parking needs, she said she’d like to partner with developers new and old to fix the issue that has loomed large since she started campaigning in 2015.
“It was the number one issue when I was campaigning and it is an issue that I talk about almost every single day,” Pearce said. “I’ve gone through a long list of options with city staff in trying to be creative about parking. So while we’re going to see some parking wins coming up, those are not wins that just happened this week. These are things we’ve been working on for a very long time.”
A Google Maps screenshot of the area of focus.