Starting later this year, Hermosa Beach may begin more aggressively enforcing parking violations associated with cars stretching out of the driveway and onto the sidewalk.
The enhanced enforcement, long sought by community activists, is part of an effort to bring the city more fully into compliance with federal mandates about access for the disabled. City officials, for their part, say enhanced enforcement would only follow after City Council approval and a lengthy public education campaign to limit the number of people tagged with tickets.
Motorists are able to take up the entirety of a home’s driveway “slab,” but intruding into the sidewalk violates the state vehicle code. And parking a vehicle in a way that blocks the sidewalk can force people wheelchairs to double back to a curb cut, then return in the street, exposing them to risks from passing traffic. Parents pushing children in strollers face similar difficulties.
The city’s Community Services Officers, or CSOs, are responsible for writing parking tickets in the city. Community Services Manager Georgia Moe said that the city takes the issue seriously, and has issued 13 citations for blocking a sidewalk so far this year; 187 were handed out in 2016, and 113 in 2015.
But Moe said that officers typically only give out tickets in cases of glaring violations, or when the city has received a complaint and a CSO responds to the call. As a result, the tickets likely represent only a small percent of the total number of infractions. Law enforcement officials say they support mobility goals, but believe it is important that police officers retain some discretion about when to write tickets.
“If you can’t get by with a wheelchair or stroller, that’s one thing…but I don’t ever want to say ‘zero tolerance,’” she said.
The problem is compounded in Hermosa by the infrequency with which residents store cars in their garages, many of which are too small to store modern sport-utility vehicles. And while newly built homes have to comply with ADA, the city’s stock of older homes sometimes have no sidewalk at all in front of them, while in others the “apron,” the slanted section of concrete for approaching the driveway, is indistinguishable from the sidewalk.
The practice is so common, police and city staff say, that most people probably do not realize it is illegal. Others may recognize it as a violation, but reason that it won’t be pursued very seriously because of a much-lamented lack of street parking in some neighborhoods.
Final decisions about allocating time and resources to the problem will wait until at least after the City Council holds a code enforcement study session in April, said City Manager John Jalili. In the interim, the city is planning an education campaign on the subject, bracing for backlash especially in those areas where parking is already an issue.
“The problem is a lot simpler in places with continuous sidewalks, places like the Valley with lots of new subdivisions,” Jalili said. “This gets a lot more complicated in places like Hermosa and Manhattan [Beach] where people have cars with no place to put them.”
