Annoyed by neighbors who park on the street? You’re not alone

Those darned neighbors who park their cars on the street instead of their driveways create quite a nuisance. When their guests do it too, other drivers are often forced into oncoming lanes.

What’s worse, they may be causing traffic hazards. And it’s likely to get worse during the holidays.

“It’s a persistent problem. I don’t know the solution,” said Joanne Fineberg, president of the Coldstream homeowners association near Lake Murray, which she said has no neighborhood regulations, or covenants, on parking.

Miles away in one of The Summit neighborhoods in northeast Richland County, “We’ve had several incidents where cars have been sideswiped,” said Harold Doctor, association president for four adjoining neighborhoods in The Summit development.

Because those neighborhoods have covenants, homeowners have been issued warnings and even fined for breaking bans on street parking.

In The Mill subdivision just west of the town of Lexington, residents must get permission from the homeowners’ organization for overnight guests to park on the street. Visitors for a party must park on one side of the street and not block the driveways of residents.

But the problems – which tend to surface and then disappear quickly – keep coming back, and enforcement is spotty.

“This, probably next to speeding in neighborhoods, is the thing we get most complaints about,” Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said. “It is a public safety issue when you have cars parked in the street. A kid could dart out in the road (and) you can’t see them if cars are parked in the way.”

Even if it’s a deputy parking a cruiser on the street at the officer’s own home, Lott said his office will order them to stop.

Less dangerous but irritating are guests at a party whose cars make it hard for a resident to pull out of their own driveways, several homeowners association officials said.

The problem of parking in subdivisions is not as great in unincorporated Lexington County, according to sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Adam Myrick. As long as emergency vehicles can get through, deputies usually leave enforcement to homeowners associations that have covenants, he said.

Requests to interview Lexington County Sheriff Jay Koon or the sheriff department’s chief code enforcer went unanswered.

The problem in the town of Irmo, which straddles the Richland and Lexington county line, was bad enough this summer that police wrote nearly 50 tickets over a weekend in August.

Parking along streets and in yards grows worse during the summer or the holidays when residents tend to have more parties, Irmo Police Chief Don Perry said. Students coming home from college also can add to the problem.

A pushback from those who were ticketed prompted town council to suspend its law that is more than 30 years old. Council will revisit the dispute in January.

In the meantime, it’s no longer illegal to park on neighborhood streets in the town of 12,000, so fewer people are complaining, Perry said.

State and county laws do not ban parking along streets unless the vehicles create a safety hazard for other motorists or make it tough for fire trucks, ambulances or law enforcement cruisers to get to where they’re going, authorities said.

“That convenience for you can cause someone to lose their life,” Lott said of vehicles that obstruct first responders. “Those are precious seconds.”

Lt. Danny Brown, who oversees 14 Richland deputies who make up the Community Action Team, said officers will talk to violators when the street has no-parking signs or cars are positioned at intersections or on blind curves and other places where visibility is difficult.

“That’s when we step in and try to get people to move,” Brown said. In the worst cases, deputies can have vehicles towed away.

The problem is more acute in subdivisions with narrower streets and shorter driveways, which tends to be in newer developments. Older subdivisions – those developed 40 years ago or more – were often built with wider streets and driveways that can better accommodate cars, said residents interviewed for this article.

Residents of Concord Park, a relatively new subdivision in Cayce, for example, travel along narrow roads, said John Raley, whose son lives in the neighborhood.

“If cars are parked on both sides of the street, you can barely get a car through,” said Raley, who is president of the Edenwood homeowners association, an older subdivision that abuts Concord Park.

Street parking also has an age component, he said. “The ones that park on the street are kind of the younger generation,” Raley said of Edenwood, which is about five decades old.

Doctor, of Richland County’s Kingston Trace neighborhood, said subdivision rules in his and the adjoining neighborhood he represents are strictly enforced by residents.

Homeowners must get prior approval for street parking when they host gatherings, and guests must park along one side of the narrow streets.

The first few offenses will result in warnings, Doctor said. Those who persist may be fined by the homeowners’ association starting at $50 and up.

“It’s very rare, but we’ve had to fine people,” he said.

In Coldstream, neighbors tend to vent about the issue on social media or they expect the homeowners association, which has little muscle and too few members, to deal with the problem, Fineberg said.

Coldstream has narrow streets and short driveways at its 1,000 homes, she said.

“You just have to adjust to it,” Fineberg said. “I don’t want to live in a cookie cutter neighborhood where everything has to be perfect. I have a helluva lot more things to get (ticked) off about than people parking in the street.”

This story was originally published November 22, 2017 at 10:37 AM with the headline "Annoyed by neighbors who park on the street? You’re not alone."