Long Beach parking issued 93 citations for double parking in October and November.
Turning lanes, red-painted curbs and traffic lanes — Long Beach residents are creating their own solutions to the city’s parking problems, and they’re willing to risk a ticket to do it.
Double parking – using a traffic lane to park alongside a car at the curb – now has been joined by cars cozied up together in the middle of the road. Maybe some of them have their hazard lights on, set to blink on and off through the night. Most of them, however, sit comfortably but illegally, declaring that Long Beach lacks sufficient parking.
Parking has worsened in recent years as California pushes for denser housing, including accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and mixed-use zoning.
In the last 30 years, California has funneled $3 billion to various cities to bolster the creation of affordable housing. According to the City’s housing production dashboard, 1,300 units were developed in 2021, including 213 ADUs.
The U.S. Census estimates Long Beach had a total of 179,530 housing units in 2020, and it doesn’t help that the average home in Long Beach has at least two cars, according to Data USA.
While the population and housing supply have grown, the amount of available parking has largely remained stagnant. In some areas, such as Downtown, delivery vehicles have normalized parking in the middle of two lanes to make a quick stop; in other parts of the city, it’s a frequent overnight occurrence.
Parking challenges have made parts of the city “almost unlivable. It’s frustrating,” said Daniel Anaya, who grew up in North Long Beach, one of the city-identified “parking impacted areas.”
Anaya parked illegally a few times with his own car, before switching to a motorcycle and a paid parking garage space.
Long Beach’s Parking Impacted Areas map was last updated in April, and identifies parts of North Long Beach, Central Long Beach, Belmont Heights, Belmont Shore, Wrigley and more. These city-identified areas mean if a property owner wants to sell a home, they’re required to sign off on a report stating the home has “off-street parking spaces.”
This isn’t required for areas outside of the “parking-impacted” zones, or for apartments, condominiums or townhomes with a parking facility.
Rogue parking is happening throughout the city, and from October to November, Long Beach issued 93 citations for double parking alone, according to Public Works.
City Traffic Engineer Paul Van Dyke told the Signal Tribune on Nov. 29 that the city was in the process of addressing one of the most popular double parking destinations: Pine Avenue in Downtown.
Van Dyke said the street already was scheduled for repaving, so they changed the striping designs to eliminate the center turning lanes and changed the parking lines from parallel to diagonal on the west side.
Van Dyke said these aren’t cut-and-paste solutions, and the City is assessing streets on “a case-by-case basis.” Belmont Shore is another area that frequently has trucks and delivery vehicles parked in turning lanes or blocking pathways, so Van Dyke said the City is “looking to reconfigure its loading zones.”
A California law passed on Jan. 1, 2023 said that Long Beach may implement a pilot program where vehicles can park “on the left-hand side of the roadway parallel to and within 18 inches of the left-hand curb on two-way local residential streets.”
The area that can be included in the pilot program is limited to the streets perpendicular to Ocean Boulevard beginning at Balboa Place and ending at 72nd Street, but excludes 62nd Place.
Van Dyke told the Signal Tribune that “the provision for parking along the Peninsula is already in effect.”
This article was updated on Dec. 27 to include responses from the City’s Traffic Engineer, Paul Van Dyke.
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