John Street parking to reduce for crosswalk
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on May 12, 2016 1:46 PM
John Street in downtown Goldsboro will lose several curbside parking spaces within the month on the block from Mulberry Street to Walnut Street after the Goldsboro City Council approved removing the parking in favor of a crosswalk at its Monday night meeting.
About a half dozen spaces in front of The Flying Shamrock and Torero's Family Mexican Restaurant will be removed. The council said it was worried about drivers seeing pedestrians crossing the street with the current parking arrangement.
The crosswalk will stretch from the alleyway between The Yoga Connection and Torero's Family Mexican Restaurant to the John Street parking lot entrance beside The Flying Shamrock directly across from the alley.
The council looked at three different options for reconfiguring the street in a way that would make it safer for pedestrians to cross between shops and restaurants on the street.
Two of the options involved removing parking at the corners of parking lot access beside The Flying Shamrock and Torero's Family Mexican Restaurant to give drivers exiting the parking lots a better view of the street.
The third option, which was the option approved by the council, involved removing all parking along the 100 block of John Street and installing a crosswalk.
Mayor Chuck Allen suggested an additional crosswalk on the side of Torero's Family Mexican Restaurant that does not have an alley.
"I'm just going to tell you as somebody that comes down that street 20 times a day, in my opinion, first thing is people park in the John Street parking lot on the other side of The Flying Shamrock are not going to walk down, walk across to the crosswalk and cross the road there," Allen said. "So to me, you should take all of the parking out of there because all of it creates a terrible situation for pedestrians because they're coming out from between cars and you can't see them when you're coming down the street."
The city is in the process of seeking DOT approval for the installation of both crosswalks.
The existing parking spaces will be removed as John Street is milled in the near future to prepare it to be resurfaced, and then the crosswalk will be installed and where parking currently is will be designated as a no parking zone.
John Street is a road maintained by the North Carolina Department of Transportation.
"There are several other streets in the city that the DOT needs to mill. When they bring in the milling machines they'll mill them all and do the paving within 48 hours," said City Engineer Marty Anderson.
Anderson said he expects the work to be completed in the last half of this month.