Downtown Brooklyn won’t get new alternate-side parking regulations until at least the fall — after the city finally finishes installing new signs in Park Slope that have allowed that neighborhood to have a parking reprieve all summer.
Community Board 2, which covers Downtown, Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO, Fort Greene and Boerum Hill, has long lobbied to have its streets cleaned once a week, not two — a proposal that would end local drivers’ twice-weekly scramble for parking.
Board members say the change is necessary to allow for more-frequent street cleaning — but the Department of Sanitation consistently ranks streets in the area as acceptably clean, a status that puts CB2 further down the list of neighborhoods slated to get cutbacks on “No parking” hours.
Before anything can happen, though, the Department of Transportation must finish changing signs in Community Board 6. That process began this summer in Park Slope and will continue through the fall in Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Red Hook.
“We should get to [CB2 neighborhoods] within the year,” the Sanitation Department’s community affairs officer Ignazio Terranova told CB2 last week. “It’s just about getting everything coordinated.”
If the proposal were approved, all alternate-side parking would be suspended in the neighborhoods while the city installs signs explaining the set of new street-cleaning regulations — just like in Park Slope.
Then, when the new rules kick in, each side of the street would have “No parking” hours only once a week instead of the current twice.
— with Jessica Firger
