How? The property is clearly well maintained. The user is not a customer, in any way, in fact has been asked not to park there. Where’s the liability?
That’s not how easments work.
Easements don’t just happen. In an implied easement, it’s a court decision. And the burden is on the party seeking the easement. And there is a legal distinction between allowing something to happen and it happening without your consent.
That seems quite unlikely to me.
I am a lawyer. I am not a property law expert. But thinking back to what I learned about property law, letting some strangers or neighbors occasionally park a car on a small piece of your property out of situational convenience cannot create an easement or be a basis for adverse possession. As for the damage to the car, I can’t see how the property owner could be liable unless E was creating a hazard, like leaving unexplored landmines around. The law doesn’t require you to be a hardass about simple human courtesies.
So far as I recall from property law, your action can simply be to send a letter saying “I give you permission to occasionally cross my property line for X, Y, and Z purposes but not erect any permanent structures or make changes to the fixtures or land.”
This reminds me of something that happened several years ago. I had a couple/few yards of gravel dumped next to the road where I parked my Jeep. I went after the pile with a shovel and rake to make a nice, non-boggy place to park. I was about halfway finished when I decided to take a break. When I came out, there was an SUV parked there with nobody around. It turned out to be some people visiting someone, and they didn’t return for a couple of hours. It was annoying, as I wanted to finish, but also kind of funny too.
A couple of years later the county upgraded the storm drains and covered most of the area with asphalt, effectively widening the street. They also paved the previously-gravelled area (about four feet) up to our driveway, which was nice. The Jeep, or sometimes anther vehicle is parked in its traditional place, with the front about a foot from the telephone pole. Nobody else but me and people visiting us has parked behind me since.
In this particular case, we quickly put up a fence along the property line. That was the end of it; we never heard from the owner of the adjacent property after that (or before that).
Likely nothing good will come from letting someone park on your property. It’s their truck, it’s their responsibility to find a legal place to park it. If nothing else they know they don’t own the parking spot, and yet they think it’s ok to park there.
I would definitely put up some sort of barrier or sign. Just some 4x4 landscape timbers might make the point without being too obnoxious. If you don’t really need that space, maybe tear up the asphalt and let it revert to grass? Either way the longer you let it go on, the harder it may be to straighten out.
What catastrophic outcome do you imagine is likely?
How about hhe good of allowing a fellow human a minor convenience?
Oak trees have been known to fall on things.
An RV/boat parking spot on a property is a significant asset when selling a home. This spot wouldn’t fit one of those monster RVs built on tour bus chassis, but anything smaller could squeeze in there. There’s high demand for that sort of thing. So I’d rather maintain it than get rid of it against the day I sell this house.
Who knows, maybe they are dealing drugs, they are parking there to stalk a person on the street, or they trip and fall on a tiny crack in the pavement and sue you. Maybe they just litter. Maybe they cut someone off on the freeway and the road rager that follows them thinks they live in your house. But if the person isn’t parked there none of that will happen.
Best case truck guy just doesn’t know it’s private property. But otherwise IMO it’s rude to just park your large vehicle somewhere that you don’t own and without permission.
If you have parking on your property you want people to freely use that’s up to you, but I wouldn’t want the hassle or liability.
I probably would not choose to park in that spot because I’d be unsure if it was private. But it is no way obviously so, and I can imagine a reasonable person assuming it was just part of the public street. There are plenty of deeply forested neighborhoods around here that have tons of these turnout or spot looking paved things. Some are obviously public, for example alongside a greenbelt very near to a hiking trailhead. Some are less obvious, but that doesn’t look very different from street parking in some of the older neighborhoods around here. And there are many private spots in narrower streets that look very much like “traditional” street parking (e.g. parallel parking alongside the road) where they’ve put up signs.
I’d put up the sign and then do what you want (tow or not) for anyone who disobeys the sign. But I don’t think anyone who’s parked there up until this point has done anything particularly antisocial either.
It would never occur to me to pull into a driveway like that to park when there is free and ample parking on the street as the OP as described.
Here’s the thing: that spot looks (to some people) like it is free parking. I realize that for you and a number of other commenters in this thread, it’s clearly, self-evidently a private parking space on private property, and that it would be an invasion of someone else’s personal property to park on it.
The thing of it is, I live in a development that, when I moved in, had very similar cutouts that weren’t private property. They’re all gone now as development has continued and the development has filled up, but there are a couple of nearby developments that still have them. From my personal experience, that kind of cutout simply isn’t self-evidently a private parking space on private property. It looks a lot like the cutouts I’ve seen that are effectively disused common areas that are just abandoned or not-utilized yet extensions of the public street, or utility right-of-way improvements that amount to the same thing.
Now, I personally am pretty skittish about parking anywhere that I’m not 100% certain I’m supposed to be parking, so I personally wouldn’t park in that spot. But I think it’s not entirely unreasonable for someone to assume that it is an area available for free parking.
ETA: Plus what @Driver8 posted just before you.
I don’t live in a development. I live in an unincorporated area. The parking spot is clearly being maintained, and nobody maintains anything in this area except the homeowners. There’s not even street lights. I can see if you lived in a place with common areas where some sort of neighborhood maintainence is done outside of the private properties (greenways, mailbox areas etc) that it would be unclear if it were a public or private spot. That might make it more ambiguous. I see this as very much less so. Having said that, I am going to put up a sign to make it clear that it’s private.
FYI, here’s the amount of street parking available immediately adjacent to that parking spot. This is from street view immediately in front of that parking space. I’ve rubbed out the street name and such for privacy. You could park six or seven cars on this cul de sac easily.
Yeah! Like not blocking their driveway, no longer requiring them to come looking for you when they’d like to leave?
The OP’s driveway isn’t blocked.
I agree with putting the signs up and seeing if you have any further issues. If you do, it’s not too hard to put up two simple posts and a chain that you can detach from one end, and keep the chain closed whenever you aren’t using it.
Checking Home Depot you can get two galvanized corner posts intended for a chain length fence build out for about $16/ea. You can then sink those into 18" deep holes with wet concrete in them or you can actually do like a 18" hole with the bottom 3-4" gravel, put the posts into that (level it) and fill the area around them with gravel (this won’t be as good but will last a long time and you don’t have to mess with mixing concrete.) Then get a length of metal chain, bolt one end into one of the posts permanently, and then maybe sink an eye bolt into the other post and get a fastener that lets you easily attach/detach the chain from that side. This is a fast and dirty/low tech approach, and remember it’s not intended to stop any serious effort of passage, it’s just there to easily show people “don’t come in here.” Because they would have to move the chain to do so, you could put a pad lock on the open end of the chain if desired.
How does “different social experiences” override centuries old property rights laws?
I guess part of the problem is that the strangers driving in your neighborhood don’t necessarily know all those details. Even though you clearly know the neighborhood design, the people coming to visit may be from any number of different kinds of neighborhood. Someone coming from an apartment, subdivision, different city, etc. will apply their own experiences to what they see and come to their own conclusions.
My initial thought of the situation is that it’s a person coming to your area to exercise. Rather than being there to visit anyone, they are coming out for a run because they live in a more congested area or an area which doesn’t have nice views. That happens in my neighborhood. I sometimes see cars randomly parked in essentially deserted areas. I used to wonder what kind of shenanigans were going on, but after a while I started to realize than when I saw a car like that, I often saw someone running or walking in the area. So it may be someone unfamiliar with the area who just thought it was a good place to park without thinking about all those details.