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It may be the longest bus stop in all of Brooklyn — but it’s no longer the most confusing.
After The Brooklyn Paper’s shocking article last week about a “No parking” sign with conflicting information on both sides, the Department of Transportation has fixed the sign on Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights — but has chosen not to do anything about the enormous bus stop that is even more frustrating to some locals.
Here’s the deal: At the corner of Washington Avenue and Dean Street is a typical blue-and-red “No parking bus stop” sign. About 120 feet to the north is another “No parking” sign — the standard indicator of when street sweeping hours were in effect. But for some reason that has been lost in the mists of bureaucracy, this “No parking” sign had a double-headed arrow on the street side and a single-headed arrow on the sidewalk side. As a result, drivers, who were looking at the double-headed arrow, believed that they could legally park to the south of the sign during the legal parking hours, while enforcement agents, who only saw the side of the sign facing the sidewalk, would write tickets because their side of the sign indicated that there was never any legal parking to the south of the sign.
That problem was solved this week, as the Department of Transportation corrected the sign so that both sides read the same: it is never legal to park to the south of the signpost.
But now drivers are fuming because they feel that they’ve lost two or three car lengths of legal parking.
Sarah Peck, co-owner of Café Ortine, which is on the block, said that the city should have no only fixed the two-faced sign, but also installed another signpost to trim the size of the enormous bus lane.
“The bus stop is several cars longer than it should be,” she said. “It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the oil. If enough people complain eventually they’ll put up a sign.”
Not likely, said Transportation spokesman Scott Gastel.
“It’s not uncommon for a bus stop to be this length or even longer,” he said. “Of the 1,200 bus stops in the borough, over 100 are more than 100 feet.”
For now, at least, the confusion over the ticketing is over. Not that locals are satisfied.
“I always saw cars being ticketed and towed from the location on days and times when parking should be allowed according to the street side of the sign,” said one driver who started monitoring the situation when he received just such a ticket several months ago.
Steve Guidi, co-owner of Café Ortine, said he did not relish having a front row seat on the confusion.
“People were getting tickets all the time,” he said.
©2009 Community Newspaper Group
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