COMMENTARY Entering the Fudville Zone

NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — Consider, if you will, a street in a small town in Northwest Arkansas. Block Street, a quiet, one-way street that for years has served the residents of Fudville (Fayetteville) well.

Then came renovations from well-intended people who couldn’t help from breaking something that was fixed, so they could re-fix it.

You’re traveling one direction - the parking spaces are facing the other direction. You’re forced to back your vehicle into a parking space in order to park.

There’s a sign post up ahead ...

You’ve just crossed over into the Fudville Zone.

The city’s Transportation Committee expressed the most concern for the part of the street between Dickson and Spring, according to a report in the variety of newspapers owned by this company that happened to cover a Fudville committee meeting.

The section of Block Street - between Dickson and Spring - has rear-in angle parking on one side and parallel parking on the other side of the street, making for an 11-foot-wide travel lane, assuming everyone parks correctly, which is a huge assumption for Fudville drivers.

The natural instinct for most drivers is to swing out and pull in forward, pretty much defeating the purpose of rear-in angle parking - a concept that just sounds like it’s something high school seniors might attempt down by the river after the prom.

The report said the committeeasked the Engineering Department to come up with new design options for the remaining part of the street between Spring Street and the downtown square. The block between Dickson and Spring streets is nearly complete.

“I’m just concerned that this was a poorly planned design and we didn’t show enough concern when we designed this, and just rushed through,” said Matthew Petty, a council member from Ward 2 who serves on the city’s transportation committee.

Yeah, you’d think they’d have, oh, maybe, drawings or design plans to look at beforehand.

What?

They did?

OK. Never mind.

Petty also took issue with rear-in angle parking because if vehicles back up all the way to the curb, much of the back-end of the car or truck is hanging over the new 9-foot-wide sidewalk, which he says takes space away from pedestrians.

City Engineer Chris Brown countered the cars aren’t taking away any more of the sidewalk than the new tree wells.

Uh, Petty didn’t likethat answer.

“We basically just made those sidewalks four or five feet wide, and that’s essentially what we didn’t want,” he said.

Of course, there’s always the option to get private money involved in the process - call it “The Block Street Southpass Project.”

What?

They’ve already tried that Southpass thing?

Never mind that idea, too.

At the very least Fudville leaders should be able to get out of this money pit without having to pave over the entire project and call it a parking lot like they did with the downtown hotel TIF district.

Although ...

“I think when it comes to this project, we had all the right goals, in mind, but we ended up missing the mark,” said Petty.

“We’ve turned it into a parking lot that’s difficult to maneuver around.”

OK, so they’ve already called it a parking lot.

There’s still nothing wrong with scraping up the paint and letting people park diagonally, front-end first like cars still do in the rest of western civilization.

For the remainder of the street, when committee members get the next set of plans, they might consider studying what’s being proposed - not using crayons to color in between the lines.

BOB CAUDLE WRITES A HUMOROUS COMMENTARY ON LOCAL, STATE AND NATIONAL ISSUES. HE IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY INSULTER.