North Dakota Parking

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This is where instead of parking at the curb, parking is done diagonally in the middle of the street. I call it North Dakota because that is where I first encountered it and it seems most prevalent in the Northern Plains states where land is cheap and making the streets as wide as aircraft cariers makes no difference.

I hadn’t seen this kind of parking south of Ft. Collins, CO until I was at the St. Louis airport on Monday. It seems especially stupid when you have an 82 year old father who can barely walk have to cross heavy traffic to get to someone with a wheelchair.

Does this style of parking exist all over North America or is it a geografic oddity as I always thought?

2

I have never seen it in Lousiana, Texas, or anywhere in New England.

3

I’ve only seeen it once and that was in a small town somewhere along the CO/OK border.

4

The only time I saw that in NoDak was when plowed snow made it hard to get in close to the curbs.

5

There’s a road in Sarasota FL that uses it, in trying to be like another “downtown” shopping area. There are a few restaurants on that street but I don’t think the area’s really caught on, maybe because of the parking.

6

I just realized the OP was talking about places where the parking is actually marked that way. Yes, definitely, you see that in North Dakota. My wife’s hometown has all the downtown streets marked that way. It’s pretty cool.

7

A town about 25 miles south of here (Slayton, Minn.) has diagonal parking both at the curb and in the middle of the street. I hate parking there or trying to drive through downtown.

8

Just to throw and outlier in they have it in Pismo Beach, California.

9

There are a couple of blocks in Long Beach, California that are like this, but they’re quite atypical around here.

These blocks shown in that map link (one north-south, and one east-west) are on streets around a couple of churches, a Petroleum Club, and some apartment buildings. They are pretty sleepy streets in a residential area. Atlantic Avenue, a block to the east, is the major business-lined road through that part of town.

10

I’ve seen it in towns in Iowa, in small towns. I’ve always assumed it let you put in a road that was 3 lanes wide (2 driving, 1 parking), instead of 4 (2 driving, 2 parking).

11

Also various small towns sprinkled across Northern California. The charming “Emerald Triangle” hamlet of Garberville comes to mind.

12

Yep, my home town of Durand, WI, has parking like this. 'Course, it also has less than 2000 people, so traffic isn’t much of a problem. It’s not as bad as you think, backing up out of the parking stall.

13

It used to be along a section of the Boulevard here in Richmond, but the City did away with it during the last resurfacing of the road.

14

There’s 2 blocks of it in downtown Suffolk VA, but I’ve not seen it anywhere else.

I also think it’s stupid and prone to cause accidents, so I avoid that street as much as possible.

15

:smack: Misunderstood the OP, so scratch Garberville and add Gonzales, California, which is in Monterey County instead of up in Emerald Triangle country.