Parking Space Half Into Public Sidewalk
In August 2011 I addressed part of the parking issue at Vito’s on Lindell (see Where is Vito’s Disabled Parking?). Last week I had dinner at Vito’s, going in I spotted another problem with how their parking lot is designed.
This car is parked in what appears to be a legitimate parking space in their lot. The problem is the space isn’t even long enough for a smart fourtwo so any car parked in the space sticks out into the public sidewalk.
The city has minimum requirements for the size of parking spaces, and the sidewalk can’t be counted toward the minimum. Vito’s needs to redesign their parking lot to provide a disabled space and to eliminate this space that extends over the sidewalk.
— Steve Patterson
The other day I came across a handicap parking space in front of a grocery store rendered unusable because the snow plow driver had filled it with a mountain of snow. By this time, most of the snow had melted off the lot, but the handicap space was still unaccessible due to a still melting snow pile. So it must have been out of commission for weeks. Why would a snow plow driver do that?
The problem is a very mixed message – the lot is striped for diagonal parking (that starts at the public sidewalk), yet this non-spot has a concrete wheel stop that implies that parking is OK. What really needs to happen is to designate the first “real” spot (the one immediately to the left) as the accessible space and to stripe this non-space as the access area (and remove the wheel stop), since it offers direct access to the public sidewalk and the restaurant entrance. Next, enforcement needs to happen. Drivers park where they shouldn’t because they continue to get away with it. If you want compliance, you need to be consistent and aggressive: http://www.aetv.com/parking-wars/
I”m still going to patronize Vitos. And while YOU were patronizing them, why didn’t you call Vito or the manager over and explain the situation instead of scurrying away?
We were there for my birthday dinner, the last thing I wanted to do was complain.
Vito or his brother are there just about every night. Why not say something? They may not ave given it any thought before.