MORGANTOWN — Red curbs. Blue curbs.
Yellow curbs. New curbs.
Where can you park? Where can you go?
Will you get a ticket? Will your car get a tow?
A Suessian rhyme that, much like Morgantown’s on-street parking guidelines, appears without reason.
“Generally, when you see a curb you make a decision about whether or not you can park there based on its color, right? If it’s yellow, you can’t park there. If it’s unpainted, anybody can park there any time. If it’s blue, it depends on what shade of blue, right? You might need a permit for that, or maybe another kind of permit. If it’s red, you probably can’t park there. It might be a loading zone, or a fire zone. If it’s green … I don’t know,” Morgantown Staff Engineer Drew Gatlin recently told the Morgantown Traffic Commission.
The problem, Gatlin continued, is that these color-coded rules aren’t always followed, nor is the very limited guidance spelled out in city code when it comes to on-street parking.
Instead, parking decisions have been made piecemeal over time as issues have arisen – and those decisions have been made citing a wide range of factors.
In other words, there is no policy that makes it easy to understand, communicate and predict how the city will make determinations about when and where parking should be restricted, and to what degree.
As things stand, Gatlin said the most straightforward policy on the books focuses specifically on when on-street parking should be restricted across from a driveway.
That policy was last updated in the mid-90s, and basically says the city will automatically restrict parking across from a driveway on any street that’s not more than 22 feet wide.
“Interestingly, somehow over the past, what, 31 years, that 22 feet shrank to 20 feet,” he said. “Interesting right, given that vehicles have become longer and wider, that our policy or practice has shrunk. But yeah, there are lots of other reasons that we have responded sort of ad hoc to restricting parking.”
The commission agreed to form a subcommittee to look over exactly what’s on the city’s books and, potentially, put forward criteria to inform consistent policies moving forward.
“It sounds like currently the existing loose framework of a policy is informed mostly by driveway entrances and exits, and you’re saying it ought to be informed by all of these things, because that’s what is informing the existing situation,” ex-officio member Caitlyn Lewis said, referencing a list of factors including street width, mailbox locations, driveway locations, crosswalks, curves, trash pickup locations, intersections, bus/transit stops, fire hydrants and development density among many others.
“Exactly,” Gatlin responded. “These are the things that people are making decisions on in a non-systematic manner.”
Commission Chairman Brennan Williams said he believes that needs to change.
“I have a real problem with that. I mean, we can’t be ambiguous and vague about what we’re enforcing, especially when we’re getting police involved and asking them to enforce it,” he said.
