Coffee and Maple Logs in the Lobby

Yes, I’m about to launch into a boring safety presentation that affects a very small population in my neighborhood, and I don’t even have coffee and maple logs in the lobby to make up for the boredom you’re about to endure. Sorry.

Nevertheless, we’ve got a problem, right here in River City.

We live three houses south of the intersection of Matchpoint and Tiebreaker drives, on Matchpoint. At the second house, Matchpoint, which starts out in an easterly direction southbound, makes a turn to the south two houses in.

Two of our neighbors are engaged in a (mostly) silent war over who gets to park and when on the south end of the curve, headed south. Most often, there’s a trailer there belonging to one neighbor, or a black SUV belonging to the sister of another neighbor (both appear in the picture above).

Occasionally, there’s a red pickup with a camper in the bed (seen here parked in the driveway) on the corner. Such as this week. It’s a *leetle* hard to see around.

Additionally, there’s almost always a car parked on the northbound side of the curve (the white one you see here).

It may be an optical illusion, but I’m fairly certain Matchpoint narrows a bit as it enters the curve, widening up a bit again once the curve is passed.

That narrowing road, combined with the constantly-parked vehicles, is the problem. Or at least the root of other problems.

This is going to shock you, but people travel fairly fast on this street. I don’t have a radar gun so I may be exaggerating a bit, but I’m fairly certain some people approach this curve at more than 30 miles an hour, sometimes pushing 35. This is a 25 mph zone, as are all residential streets in Ammon.

Problem?

• Street narrows in the curve (maybe)
• Cars or trailer constantly parked on the curve, both sides
• Drivers going fast through the curve

There are blind spots. We have to be really careful, backing out of our driveway, to make sure there’s no one approaching the curve from the north because if they come around the corner and we’re backing out, well, that’s not a good thing.

Also, we’ve nearly been hit once in the winter when a car going a bit too fast came into the curve at about the same time we did. He couldn’t see us coming because of the parked obstruction and went into a skid when he saw us. We were able to slow and move as far to the right as we could. He got out of the skid and moved as far to his right as we could. But it was a close thing.

I’ve mentioned there’s a (mostly) silent war going on amongst the two neighbors. So talking to them about the problem isn’t going to fix things. Neighbor one got the city/police involved at one point. The result? A trailer I had temporarily parked in front of our house, far enough from the curve not to be a problem in this particular situation, was tagged as “abandoned” by the city and I only knew about it because the neighbor who contacted the city or police pointed the obscurely-placed tag out and said I should probably get the trailer moved. I did. And yet the trailer/truck/camper combinations are constantly on the curve, without a peep from police or the city.

They’re causing the problem. And I’m the one who almost had a trailer towed over it.

I’ve got a solution. The city should implement a “no parking” zone on the southbound portion of the curve, where the problem parking occurs:

The no parking zone (in red, above) would still leave plenty of room for parking, including a parking spot even closer to my driveway (not ideal for us, but I concede there’s a need for parking here).

Will it happen?

Probably not.

I contacted the city this week, and they said they'd have an engineer come out and take a look. I did not bring up the idea of a no-parking zone, because that ought to be up to the city to decide. We'll see what happens.