TITLE
Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Section 10.22.184 establishing a pilot program permitting left curb parking in designated areas, read and adopted as read. (District 3)
DISCUSSION
The Peninsula neighborhood is a parking impacted neighborhood with limited land available for development. Residential streets in this neighborhood can be characterized as short, narrow roadways, perpendicular to Ocean Boulevard, that dead-end at the water’s edge, without sufficient turn-around areas for vehicular traffic. This thereby reduces the space available for safely maneuvering vehicles, to which is attributed the 30 accidents within the subject area during a five-year period; eight of these accidents involved vehicles moving in reverse.
Given the parking challenges that exist in the Peninsula, drivers often park the left side of their vehicles parallel to the left-hand curb out of convenience and safety. This practice is illegal, pursuant to the California Vehicle Code, which has created enforcement issues in the area. The State’s Vehicle Code requires that all vehicles parked along two-way streets have the vehicle’s right-hand wheels within 18 inches of the right-hand curb, unless expressly exempted.
City of Long Beach (City) staff worked with former Assemblymember Bonnie Lowenthal to find a State legislative solution to this problem. In 2010, AB 2067 was enacted and provides the City with State legislative authority to implement a pilot program that will give Peninsula area drivers the option to park the left side of their vehicles on the left-hand side of the roadway, parallel to and within 18 inches of the left-hand curb on two-way residential streets perpendicular to Ocean Boulevard, beginning at Balboa Place and ending at 72nd Place, with the exclusion of 62nd Place.
As a condition of this authority, the State required the City to make a finding, supported by a professional engineering study, that the pi...
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