BERKELEY – The small section of South Seaside Park, just north of Island Beach State Park, swells with summertime visitors. This leads to parking issues for residents.
There are more cars using on-street parking, and that will sometimes squeeze out the residents’ vehicles.
“Parking in South Seaside Park is a disaster,” Councilman James Byrnes said at a recent Township Council meeting.
Giving an example, he talked about an 80-foot lot, where the entire front yard is stone. There is no designated driveway. So how do people determine where to park? Some residents are even putting up their own ‘no parking’ signs.
Township engineer Ernie Peters said a lot of those properties are grandfathered in. They couldn’t be built that way today. There could be a way to make them conform to the current law if they have work done or if the property changes hands.
Business Administrator John Camera said the town hall fields calls complaining about the parking as well. He suggested painting parking spots on the street and enforcing drivers to park in those spots. These painted parking spots would give the properties with stone front yards a designated driveway.
Another plus to this plan would be that it would provide more parking, he said. When people make their own parking spots, they leave a lot of room between their vehicle and the next. With painted spots, people would park in a correctly-sized parking space and more cars would be able to fit in any given spot.
One resident brought up that some of the streets are more narrow than normal streets, so that causes a problem as well.
Gary Holsten, of South Seaside Park, said that the 80-foot frontage is not as common as 40-50 feet, or even 25 feet for a duplex. There are public parking spots on Central Avenue but people don’t want to walk.
Byrnes reiterated a refrain that he wants the state to turn over a piece of property it owns over there for a parking lot.
A Berkeley Shores resident, Bill McGrath, suggested putting in curbs, but Councilman Keith Buscio said that curbs would cause the people who have multiple cars on stone to lose spots.
