Fayetteville has rarely earned a reputation for backward thinking. Even the most recent example of when that label applied, it had a far different meaning than it might for other communities.
This time, the question is whether the backward parking spaces the city installed on Block Avenue in 2010 will experience a reversal of fortunes.
What’s The Point?
The back-in parking installed on Block Avenue never caught on with motorists, but spending thousands to eliminate it seems a little backward, too.
Downtown drivers are already familiar with the subject. In a redesign of Block Avenue, city planners tried something a little different. The parking on a section of Block would angle in the same direction as the flow of traffic, requiring motorists to pull forward, ahead of the space, then back their vehicle into the spot.
The Block Avenue renovation improved the street's overall appearance and included several features designed to slow cars down, making the street more "friendly" to pedestrians. The back-in parking was the city's idea to try something different, ostensibly with the notion that making it easier to emerge from a parking space was more important than making it easy to park there.
But driver habits -- and that long-held enjoyment of poking a little fun at "funky" Fayetteville -- made the back-in spaces the brunt of plenty of jokes and/or complaints. City officials put up signs pointing out the new style of parking was "easy as 1-2-3," but so was the ridicule.
Now, some of the business owners in the area have asked the City Council to undo the parking experiment.
We suspect -- and it's only a suspicion -- that city officials realized soon after the wacky spaces were installed that the change was a mistake, but wanted to keep the experiment going. Now, city engineers say there are two options to reclaim a forward-thinking Block Avenue. Option 1 would involve re-striping the parking spaces on the street, for a cost of $28,000. Option 2 would include reconfiguration of concrete islands installed in the 2010 project. That would amount to about $42,000.
"I think it's time that we admit our mistake," Alderman Justin Tennant said. "I don't think anybody did anything wrong at the beginning. I remember hearing about it at first, and I thought, 'Well that might be kind of a neat idea.'
"But I think if it was such a great idea, we would have done it somewhere else in the city."
Likewise, we don't fault anyone for giving it the old college try. Just about every idea is goofy at some point, and occasionally you've just got to give something a try before discovering it wasn't the best idea. This is indeed one of those things that makes Fayetteville the community it is -- ideas have a chance there.
Robert Kennedy told us "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly." Well, we're talking about parking spaces here, so we won't get too grandiose. But chock this up to daring to fail.
But there is a cost to such an approach. Is it worth $42,000 to get rid of a few goofy parking spaces? That's a lot of money.
Maybe it's worth leaving the spaces there to be a reminder to thoroughly think through decisions that will be memorialized in concrete and asphalt, and how backing up can be difficult.
Commentary on 03/29/2014