Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010

Fixing Five Points

As Raleigh considers sprucing up Five Points, which business owners and nearby residents have urged, I'd like to speak up for the busy hub's overlooked stakeholders: commuters.

Thousands of workers drive through Five Points every morning and every night, and many other drivers pass there throughout the day.

Thanks to nutty on-street parking on Glenwood Avenue, they often encounter a bottleneck.

That delays them, wastes time, impedes productivity, raises tempers, invites road rage, and worsens the car pollution that causes smog.

Combined with bovine flatulence and butterfly wings flapping in the Amazon, it all adds up to either catastrophic global warming or a looming ice age, I forget which.

Yes, the city purportedly bars parking along Glenwood at Five Points during the rush hours, from 7 to 9 in the morning and from 4 to 6 in the evening. But it's a joke. If you drive through there, you know it's the only city law enforced less than our littering ban.

Almost every day, some rude, selfish yahoo or 12 park there during rush hour. In six years of driving by almost daily, I've never seen a police officer writing tickets to the impudent, prohibited parkers.

At best, the clogging causes traffic backups of several blocks inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening.

At worst, it causes crashes.

By all means, let's repair sidewalks, upgrade crosswalks, install trash cans, improve signs, and add landscaping, as the city proposes.

But let's also get parked cars off Glenwood Avenue once and for all, no matter the time. It's a major public thoroughfare, not a private parking lot.

The several dozen lost parking spaces can be made up.

First, as Raleigh Planning Director Mitchell Silver points out, there's lots of private commercial and church parking at Five Points that the property owners can share.

Second, three residential lots next to the Post Office that were planned for private redevelopment could be redeployed. Nearby businesses and/or the city could buy them together and turn them into a public parking lot with heavy landscape screening.

When I asked Silver about it, he suggested an even better idea: Buy those lots and create a small city park facing Fairview Road, with 80 to 100 public parking spaces behind.

That would benefit proprietors, neighbors, and commuters alike. Smart progress!