The College Station City Council will make a final consideration for the proposed parking restrictions in the Southside Historic Area at the meeting Thursday.
The proposed restrictions will affect the neighborhoods between George Bush Drive and Holleman Drive and to the east of Wellborn Drive and the west of Anderson Street.
Most restrictions will limit parking to one side of the street. Some streets will lose parking entirely.
“The streets in that area are so heavily congested that they cannot get an emergency vehicle through there,” said Troy Rother, a traffic engineer with College Station.
The roads in the Southside Historic Area are 21 to 27 feet wide, said Eric Hurt, fire marshal for the College Station Fire Department.
“When cars park directly across from each other, they take up approximately 17 feet of space in the road if they are parked 18 inches away from the curb like they should be,” Hurt said. “That leaves 10 feet in the best conditions. Our trucks are 9.5 feet wide.”
Hurt said there have been times when fire trucks responded to an emergency in the Southside Historic Area and were forced to park more than a block away from the incident.
“What we’re trying to do is provide the best services to residents as we can,” Hurt said.
The fire department and public works department had three public meetings with Southside residents to form a plan for parking regulations.
“We sent out postcards to the owners of the houses in the Southside Historic Area according to the Brazos County Appraisal District, informing them of the public meetings,” Rother said.
Students renting houses in this area did not receive the notices in mailboxes if the landlord did not live at the residences. This left it up to the owners to inform renters of the contingent changes.
Brittany Burns, a junior allied health major, and Natalie Wright, a junior leadership studies major, had yet to hear about the proposed changes to the parking in the area off of Dexter Drive.
“We barely fit in our driveway as it is. I wonder what would happen if we had another roommate.” Burns said.
Burns and Wright said if parking is eliminated in the area, their friends would have to walk or ride their bicycles to visit them.
“I guess we’d have to start a carpool service of our own for friends to come over,” Wright said.
Students living off Hereford Street said they would leave if the parking proposal passed.
“It’s against city ordinance to park on the grass already,” said Mason White, a junior English major. “Where will we park?”
John Paul Dodson, a junior business major said reducing parking would disrupt his roommates’ and his routines.
“Our driveway is a single lane, so every time someone needed to leave we would have to re-park,” Dodson said.
Rother and Hurt both said participants in the meetings agreed with the proposal on the whole. The majority of attendees were not students.
“It’s a compromise, it is not the perfect fix for the fire department’s side,” Hurt said. “It will still be a tight fit but we will at least be able to get through now.”
The proposal will go through its last consideration at the city council meeting on Thursday.