At the August 10th meeting of the Ludington City Council they will be deciding whether to add parking spaces by the beach at the west end of Ludington Avenue.  Before you get too happy, they are not going to revert the $600,000 plus West End Project back to the utilitarian way it was.  Instead the plan is to create eight diagonal parking spaces between Stearns Outer Drive and Lakeshore Drive.  The council packet itself does not illustrate what it would look like, but here is what it should resemble (with diagonal parking spaces in the red parallelogram zone):

Traffic Control Order # 181-A is being introduced by new LPD Chief Tim Kozal, and looking at all of the various standing committee meeting notes and other boards, this is the first time this idea has come before the city council.  On pages 27-28 in the packet he claims he is changing the parallel parking to diagonal parking in order to facilitate eight more parking spaces; the goal of TCO 181-A is to create additional parking.

There arise a couple of issues here.  The first is that the current road 'space' that is claimed to be parallel parking: it isn't.  It has never been striped to indicate it was for parking, but, more importantly, it can't be used for that purpose simply because of its dimensions.  Any car that is parked there cannot be even close to fitting inside the limit line.

Notice that the equal length black lines above indicate that this is the case.  Even parking over the curb, the outside of any vehicle would still hang a foot or more over the line.  This portion of the highway is not for parking, it's at best a shoulder, best suited for a bicycle lane.

Therefore, this is not a reconfiguration of parking rather the creation of new parking.  But the creation comes with the destruction of the rightmost lane of Ludington Avenue between the two streets for traveling and making that lane populated by parked cars.  This presents a new danger to traffic coming out of Stearns Outer Drive, who currently have a stop line where they would be hard-pressed to see oncoming traffic using the remaining lane coming west. 

Consider the blue car coming to a stop and looking eastward and assume the parking lot is full.  The four black cars would not be visible to them, whereas in the past it would be.  So as they move forward they may be surprised to find themselves in a collision.  This can be extra dangerous for the beach patrol in their ATV or others riding in their golf carts or bicycles. 

One should not be surprised that beach parking is needed, the City created that need by changing the west end into what it is and eliminating dozens of parking spaces.  This doesn't seem to be a safe alternative, and I hope the council questions the new chief on his 'reconfiguration' and any type of traffic warrant he used to decide that this was not as dangerous as it appears.

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A couple of interesting developments.  This TCO was tabled at last night's meeting, but I was notified earlier today that they were removing the parallel parking line down at the beach right where this was.  I checked it out myself this evening and the City actually has removed the old line and put in a new line that's roughly 7 feet from the curb, thereby allowing actual parallel parking w/o having part of most vehicles hanging over.  There still wasn't anybody parking there yet.

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