THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 6, 1995 TAG: 9508050070
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 18 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY BILL REED, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 144 lines
A LITTLE OVER 2 million tourists visit the oceanfront each year - most of them arriving by car in the summer.
All of them, it seems, make a beeline for the 3-mile stretch of resort beach and the strip of hotels, restaurants and shops adjacent to it.
What often follows is a feverish scramble for 7,612 parking spaces available on or near the beachfront and the results aren't pretty.
Parking, or that lack of it - especially on big holiday weekends - has been a long-term source of constant friction between visitors, resort business owners, residents adjacent to the resort and the city police.
It has spawned angry letters to the newspaper that denounce the seemingly capricious towing of cars parked along residential streets. It has created ill will among visitors who feel they have been ripped off by parking fees in municipal and private lots - they range from $5 to more than $10 a day - and streetside meters that are checked round the clock and require motorists to feed them 75 cents an hour. (Although cars with city stickers pay only $1 to park in city lots after 5 p.m.)
On the other side of the coin are local residents and a few business owners who have complained about the loutish and insensitive actions of visitors who park outside their doors, especially at night. Particularly offensive, say locals and merchants, are the loud, pre-dawn curbside parties, the littering and often drunken and disorderly behavior.
Resort merchants are torn between the two sides. They want the business generated by the increased traffic, but they also want to avoid behavior problems that often result from it.
The police have the unenviable task of refereeing the conflicts between all parties, issuing parking tickets and, in some cases, having cars towed from residential streets and business property. Officers on the street feel they are damned if they act and damned it they don't.
Barbara Yates, owner of Angie's Guest Cottage at 24th Street and a leader in an ongoing campaign to fix resort parking and behavior, summed up the issue this way:
``There's only so much room down here at the Oceanfront, and when it's full, people are going to have to go somewhere else,'' she said.
So where do you park when the Oceanfront is full?
That's a question city planners have been wrestling with for years without much success.
In an effort to reach a solution, they recently decided to toss the problem to the experts - consultants, whose business would be to dissect, rearrange and solve a shortage that only affects the Oceanfront four months out of every year.
To that end the city has floated an RFP, a ``request for proposal,'' seeking the services of a company with traffic engineering and transportation planning experience to formulate a ``master parking plan.'' This plan would cover an area bounded by Rudee Inlet to the south; 42nd Street to the north; Birdneck Road to the west and Atlantic Avenue to the east.
The winning bidder should be selected and hired within the next months, says Henry Ruiz, who heads the city's Parking Systems Management office.
Also involved in the decision to seek outside expertise was David R. Hager, an administrator at Old Dominion University and a member of a subcommittee on parking and transportation for the Virginia Beach Resort Area Advisory Commission, a citizens panel charged with overseeing resort development and activities.
What would the consultant be required to do?
``In the master plan, we're looking for alternatives to parking,'' said Ruiz, who is responsible for administering the city's five municipal parking lots, 771 parking meters, the Residential Parking Permit program for resort neighborhoods and a cadre of hired officers charged with checking meters and issuing parking tickets.
``We're trying to develop public parking away from the Oceanfront, that is easily accessible,'' says Hager. ``We've been working with TRT (Tidewater Regional Transit) to that end. They've been very responsible in terms of extending routes and length of service.''
Factored into the consultant's ultimate strategy, says Ruiz, will be a traffic circulation plan, a plan calling for the use of public transportation and satellite parking in areas to the west of the Oceanfront, like the Pavilion Convention Center and Seatack Elementary School.
The object, both Ruiz and Hager agree, is to get cars off Atlantic and Pacific avenues and let visitors walk or ride some form of public transportation to the Oceanfront.
A park-and-ride scheme that parallels those at major airports throughout the country may be what is needed, but whether or not transportation is provided by TRT remains to be seen.
At one time, multi-storied garages were thought to be the answer to the Oceanfront parking ills, but a 1991 study, conducted by the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, effectively shot down the proposal.
The costly structures would be in use for only about four months a year, HRPDC planners said. For the remaining eight months, they would be largely empty, forcing the city to struggle to pay off the cost of building them.
A light rail system between downtown Norfolk and the resort beaches was under consideration at one time as a means of moving masses of people between the two points. The concept was torpedoed by the Virginia Beach City Council for several reasons. First, the scheme was deemed too costly. Second, resort merchants bitterly opposed it on the grounds the rail system would bring in only light-spending day-trippers from Norfolk, Portsmouth and Chesapeake. Thirdly, the plan did not include provisions for transporting workers and military personnel back and forth to the Naval Base in Norfolk.
While the two proposals were discarded years ago, they may be revived in some form and incorporated into a grand plan by the hired consultant.
Recent developments, like the creation of the highly successful American Music Festival at the Oceanfront, and a revival of plans to expand the Pavilion Convention Center, may make parking garages and light rail effective tools in fighting resort parking shortages.
The music festival, which brought thousands of visitors to the Oceanfront last year, prompted the creation of a successful park-and-ride satellite system. TRT trolleys were used to shuttle patrons to beachfront stages from temporary lots established at Seatack Elementary School on Birdneck Road and the Pavilion Convention Center on 19th Street. That same system could be used on other summer weekends, when the crush of visitors limits parking.
As for the Pavilion expansion plans, city officials have been toying with the idea of including amenities that would make it a transportation hub for the Oceanfront. A proposal under consideration would make the Pavilion an arrival and departure point for people arriving by car, bus or rail.
One thing parking planners may have to largely disregard in their deliberations is federal funding. It is drying up, city planners say.
The new, Republican-dominated Congress appears determined to ram through a lean budget, free of so-called pork-barrel projects and social enhancement programs. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by DAVID B. HOLLINGSWORTH
[unidentified color cover photo - parked cars]
A mixture of tourists and locals form a traffic jam near 21st Street
and Pacific Avenue while looking for those elusive parking spaces.
ABOVE: ``In the master plan, we're looking for alternatives to
parking,'' says Henry Ruiz, who heads the city's Parking Systems
Management office.
RIGHT: ``We're trying to develop public parking away from the
Oceanfront, that is easily accessible,'' says David B. Hager, an
administrator at Old Dominion University and a member of a
subcommittee on parking and transportation for the Virginia Beach
Resort Area Advisory Commission.
Graphic
Parking Inventory 1995
Area Shown: Oceanfront Restricted Parking
KEYWORDS: PARKING VIRGINIA BEACH OCEANFRONT by CNB