AHHHHH Parking

So we have a problem with parking. Our house, and almost all the houses in my neighborhood were built around 1900 before many people had cars. Therefore, they do not have driveways and people have to park on the street. So, you know, that's not all that bad, it's not like we've ever had a garage anyway. BUT....the City of Lawrence has an ordinance (and henceforth street signs) stating the following:

Sign on the odd side of the street: No parking, even number days, 12:01AM to 6:00AM, MON-FRI, STREET SWEEPING.

Sign on the even side of the street: No parking, odd number days, 12:01AM to 6:00AM, MON-FRI, STREET SWEEPING.

Yes, very confusing. But the summary is that every night we must all park on only one side of the street, supposedly for street sweeping. Well, as you can imagine, we rarely have actually seen a street sweeper. We called the city to see when our street was being swept and these are the answers we got: "there is no schedule for street sweeping", "Thursday nights", Wednesdays", "there's a big white board with all the street names on it, and they sweepers work their way through the list until they are all done and then start over".

Hmm, interesting. Meanwhile, for those of us who live here, if we get home before 6pm we can usually find a spot on our street or the cross street on the correct side for that day and be ok. But, if we get home after 10, there is next to no spots left, and if you get home after 11:30, forget it. And, if you forget one time, or even if you remember at 1:30am and go move your car, there WILL be a ticket, EVERY TIME. So, pay up your $15 to the city. Or, if you park within 10 ft of a hydrant (which I've done), pay up your $100 to the city. Or, if you park within 20ft of the interesection (or even 22ft away as Spence and Steph did once), pay up your $20 to the city. Or, if you move to the opposite side as last night and forget tomorrow is the 1st but today is the 31st so you weren't supposed to switch, pay up your $20 to the city. And, this whole system continues in the winter for "snow removal" for every night of the week. But if it's 60 degrees out (like this past winter) and you're on the wrong side, obviously the plow couldn't get through, so pay up.

So, needless to say, we all are a little frustrated that we have to move EVERY night and our street is swept once during the week if we're lucky. So what to do? Well, we discussed this issue with our neighborcircle- a small little group of people that live within a few blocks. We were all frustrated so we did some research. We found out the problem was an ordinance written in the 70's. So we thought, well, let's change it. We did some more research and found out that most reasonable cities have a 4 to 8 hr block of time per week where cars can park only on one side and they sweep then...amazing! What logic! We wrote up a proposal to give to the city's ordinace committee to propose we make the same changes. We also got the signitures of 80 people on our street, and one street up supporting this change. We went to the ordinance commitee (which has 4 city counselors) and got put on the agenda. We got about 25 people to go to the first meeting and all of the counselors seemed supportive, they wanted some opinions from the department of public works and police so they agreed to discuss it in 1-2 meetings. We thought we were golden. We then talked to the police chief- he was supportive. We talked to the head of DPW- he was supportive, we talked to one of the city counselors- he was supportive. We tried to reach our district counselor, but she did not return our calls or emails. There was another meeting- many of us were busy that night so only 3 people could go. Then the winds changed. I wasn't there, but what I heard about it was that our distric counselor was not supportive and we couldn't really figure out why, another counselor said the trash on the streets was the residents faults cause we are sit around watching tv and we should go buy brooms and clean the streets ourselves (hmm, do I even have to talk about how rediculous that statment is?), the one counselor that had supported us crumbled under the pressure of those other two, and the 4th didn't say anything. Also, the DPW director also caved and then said maybe he wouldn't be able to clean the streets that way cause he doesnt have the man-power. So, the tabled the proposal.

We had another neighbor meeting to see where we should go from here. We feel we will get no-where with this city council- there are elections in Nov, so maybe we can vote some of them out since they obviously don't care about the residents. We also decided we needed to go back to the neighbors and let them know where things are and and try to get a larger group so we can be more effective. So, Wednesday night we went out in pairs and 3's and knocked on doors of people who had signed the petition to let them know where we are.

This was a terrifying experience for me. I am so uncomfortable in situations like this, but it actually went really well. I didn't have to do all that much talking since I went with 2 others that speak spanish much better than me, and everyone was very receptive. Several neighbors invited us in to sit and talk and were just very happy that we had stopped by. We got many people who said they'd like to get more involved and would go to city council meetings and other meetings about it. We were also able to invite people to a neighborhood cookout that is happening in 3 weeks so that was cool, we have planned to go out again in 2 weeks go knock on more doors to let people know about the cook-out and the parking and then have a table at the cook-out where we can talk about it more.

This is a new experience but I think it was really great. It's pretty fun trying to fight for something and to join with others in that fight. We feel like we're trying to start a little movement here and we know it is going to take longer than we thought, but I really think we can do it.

Here's the flyer we gave out