If you haven't heard, College Park just underwent a new zoning regulation. You now must own a residential permit to park your car on the street. This wasn't a huge problem for me, since I already have a permit to park in my apartment complex. My apartment community also gives me one visitor pass to park in specially marked visitor slots.
The problem is that if I have more than one guest coming in, there is nowhere for them to park.
After going to the City Hall Web page, I saw that residents can acquire two visitor's permits, so I wandered down to the office to pick them up. I was foiled. Apparently my zone, number eleven, does not offer visitor's permits. In fact, zone eleven only offers one permit per address, so if you live with roommates, only one of you can park on the street.
In terms of the larger scope of things, this new regulation is causing huge problems for the Catholic Student Center. Once the minuscule parking lot at the CSC fills up, visitors can no longer park nearby and walk to the CSC.
They will most likely have to use the UMD parking garage across the street.
This has to be one of the most obnoxious laws I have ever seen passed in my time in Prince George's County. I'm not even sure how it is meant to benefit the community.
I thought it was a fire prevention maneuver at first. After having two disastrous fires in less than two years on Knox Road, I figured they were trying to cut down on congestion so that, if something happens again, they at least have access. Then I saw that they put cinder blocks (like the kind they use for parking lots) in front of the Commons fire lane on Knox, making it inaccessible to firetrucks and people getting dropped off alike. So now I have no more idea what's going on than you do.
We just need to find a rich benefactor to build a garage under and apartments over the CSC. Then everyone would be happy and holy.
Posted by: Lindsay | August 18, 2007 at 10:40 PM
According to the Diamondback, one of the landlords petitioned the city council to regulate the parking so that students living in the Knox Boxes would be certain to have someplace to park.
Maybe if they didn't cram so many students into the kb's they would be able to fit all of their cars in their driveways.
Anyway, the Diamondback article makes it sound like the guy responsible for coming up with the plan didn't even think it was a good idea, but that the City Council was for some reason determined to pass it. I think I'm going to have to take a break from video games to launch a profuse letter writing campaign.
Posted by: PeterTerp | August 19, 2007 at 01:40 AM