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The city council may amend the parking ordinance to extend two-hour parking on Main Street.

Two-hour parking rules are in effect from the Neptune border to Fifth Avenue. The city’s advisory parking committee is currently looking at extending the restrictions north of Fifth Avenue to Deal Lake Drive, effectively creating border-to-border two-hour parking.

The purpose of two-hour parking on Main Street is to benefit the businesses on that thoroughfare, city manager Terence Reidy said at the April 18 council meeting in reference to increasing turnover of spaces.

However, some citizens have said current enforcement of the existing two-hour parking rules on Main Street was “sudden,” Mayor Ed Johnson said at the meeting.

“One day we were enforcing it, one day we weren’t enforcing it, and one day we were [enforcing it] vigorously,” Johnson said. “If we update or broaden the ordinance, there’s got to be some kind of PR to get the word out that we are going to enforce it.”

In court, the judge has dismissed the tickets of some people who complained the enforcement was sudden, Johnson said.

“It wasn’t by accident that the enforcement on Main Street was more rigorous when meters were installed downtown,” Reidy said. This is because those who once parked for free on Cookman Avenue started leaving their cars on Main Street to avoid the meters.

“Cars that used to be parking in the downtown are now parking on Main Street, clogging up all of Main Street,” Reidy said. “It’s a chain reaction. When you start enforcing parking in one area, people move to another area.”

Meters are expected to come to Main Street eventually. “Ultimately, Main Street will be metered,” Reidy said.

 

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