Fayetteville Street has been open to traffic for all of two days, and already the city is cashing in on parking tickets. How cops can justify parking tickets is beyond me, since the street has no markings! It doesn’t even have parking meters, as far as I can tell.
A city official is quoted as saying lines were not painted on Fayetteville Street for “aesthetic reasons.”
Uh, say what?
This I don’t understand. It’s supposed to be a street, not a work of art. Paint it like every other street. If you’re going to hand out parking tickets, paint it and/or meter it so people know what’s going on. Don’t ambush them with tickets because “aesthetic reasons” have made you lose your mind.
Ten million bucks later and the City of Raleigh is still trying to kill downtown.
We were heading through Raleigh on our way to VA Sunday afternoon, around 1pm or so. I thought it would be cool to avoid the Beltline, go downtown, and drive the four blocks of Fayetteville Street.
We went up Wilmington Street, turned onto Fayetteville Street at the southern end, and stopped. It was a nightmare. And I think it was the fault of the traffic lights. The north/south Fayetteville Street lights were on a 10-second green rotation. That’s it – 10 seconds. Then the cross streets would go green for a minute or so, then 10 more seconds of Fayetteville Street green.
It took us about four light cycles to go one block, where we immediately turned back onto Wilmington Street.
Sigh.