Reading City Council halts parking fines on Hampden Boulevard for 6 months<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Residents and some council members have questioned whether visibility was the primary cause of the crashes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s more a question of the speed of the cars on Fifth Street,\u201d Miller said, explaining that drivers entering Fifth Street may misjudge how quickly approaching vehicles are traveling.<\/p>\n
Residents along Hampden Boulevard have raised similar concerns, saying speeding and reckless driving are the larger safety issues.<\/p>\n
In a recent telephone interview, 34-year Hampden Boulevard resident Anthony Carrozza said he and his wife believe the loss of parking unfairly affects residents without addressing the cause of crashes.<\/p>\n
\u201cSpeeding, reckless, careless, drunk, high, distracted, and whatever else driving is the cause of most of the accidents up here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Carrozza said he has witnessed several crashes during his decades living on the boulevard, including three incidents in which his legally parked vehicles were struck and damaged.<\/p>\n
Removing parked vehicles makes the roadway feel more open and encourages higher speeds, he said, calling the boulevard a racetrack.<\/p>\n
Carrozza said officials should focus on enforcement rather than eliminating residential parking.<\/p>\n
Miller said he is unaware of additional crashes at Fifth and Douglas streets during the six-month moratorium.<\/p>\n
Enforcing the restrictions would hurt residents in an area where parking is already limited, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe parking situation is at such a crisis, to eliminate these spaces again would be a true hardship to the neighborhood,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n
During the previous week\u2019s discussion, Councilman Raymond Baker said he supports temporarily extending the moratorium but remains concerned about safety along Hampden Boulevard.<\/p>\n
Baker said Hampden is a heavily traveled corridor and certain curves and intersections continue to create visibility concerns.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrankly, I take Perry and Hampden every day to go to work, and if those cars are parked there, it is a sight-line issue,\u201d Baker said.<\/p>\n
Baker said he supports keeping the moratorium in place while the city moves forward with broader traffic-calming efforts.<\/p>\n
Officials said traffic studies have been completed for both North Fifth Street and Hampden Boulevard and were recently reviewed by the Local Traffic Advisory Committee.<\/p>\n
Plans are being developed for traffic-calming measures on both corridors, and the city engineer is seeking grant funding to help advance the projects.<\/p>\n
The painted no-parking zones would remain in place while officials continue to explore safety measures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Residents along portions of two state roads in Reading may be spared parking fines for another 12 months.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245729,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,182,139,28,128,130,129,706],"class_list":["post-245728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-top-stories-reg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}