Government

‘A Pattern of Abuse’: Police Commission To Remove Auto Shop’s Designated Parking Space on East Maple Street

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The volunteers who oversee on-street parking in New Canaan voted last week to spend $1,700 for a field analysis and sight line study of East Maple Street, an increasingly busy commercial area downtown whose residents say they’re concerned about traffic and safety. At its regular meeting Wednesday, the Police Commission also decided to discontinue a practice whereby an auto body shop on the corner at Main Street is allowed to park on East Maple. Instead, the commissioners said, AC Auto Body will use two designated spaces in the nearby Center School parking lot for its flatbed trucks and could park a smaller wrecker in its own lot. East Maple Street resident David Shea, who has become a spokesperson for the concerned neighbors, told the commission at its July 20 meeting that “what we are looking at is two kinds of streets when you come up East Maple from Hoyt it is a wide street.”

“As you turn in the curb toward Main it becomes a bottleneck, it narrows down,” Shea said at the meeting, held in the New Canaan Police Department’s training room. “What we are proposing is that parking only be on the right-hand side of the street, the usual two hours, and then on the right-hand side going east, that would be no-parking, no-standing [zone] that will allow traffic to pass on a two-way basis and give the residents the parking that they need.

Government

Tensions Escalate Between Auto Body Shop, Neighbors In Parking Clash on East Maple Street

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Fueled by an already tense parking situation, bad feelings between an auto body shop downtown and its neighbors on East Maple Street were ratcheted up Wednesday morning after the business’s owner deliberately parked a company car in front of the home of the residents’ spokesman. While AC Auto Body owner Anthony Ceraso said he purposely parked there for a legal two-hour period because David Shea had made a rude gesture the day before, Shea called the move is a bullying tactic and further evidence that the business should not be granted a special privilege of all-day parking in a designated area on East Maple. The ongoing dispute boiled over Tuesday when, according to Shea, Ceraso “parked four trucks up and down the street in front of residences,” prompting neighbors to snap photos and send them to on-street parking authorities “saying this is egregious and this is ridiculous, considering everything we have been through, for him to put this back in our face.”

Ceraso recounted a different version. AC Auto Body parks its trucks in an area along East Maple Street that the Police Commission had carved out because the company serves as New Canaan’s designated on-call wrecking service in emergencies. Following a two-car accident Tuesday morning at Bank and Park Streets, Ceraso said, he had two flatbed trucks return to AC Auto Body “and if you know my parking lot, you know what car capacity we have, so we moved them out on East Maple Street, not on Main Street, so that we could move cars around in our lot and drop the cars in flatbeds onto the lot.”

“We were in the trucks, we did not leave them there [on East Maple] and leaving them there for the day, that is not what we do or have ever done.

News

Facing Traffic and Safety Concerns, Town Considers Making East Maple Street One-Way

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Facing safety concerns on a short, busy road downtown that’s often pinched by commercial traffic, officials said Thursday that they will seek a traffic study to help determine whether East Maple Street should flow one-way. A bustling commercial hub with the New Canaan Cleaners served by a small lot and several on-street parkers, the L-shaped road includes more than one dozen residences and presents sightline problems for motorists seeking to exit East Maple onto Main Street, residents have told traffic officials with the town. The town body that fields traffic-calming requests in New Canaan—a work group that includes fire, police, public works and emergency management officials—“have determined that making it one-way is a viable option and may solve a lot of the problems there,” Police Capt. John DiFederico said Thursday at a regular meeting of the Police Commission. Tiger Mann, a Traffic Calming Work Group member who serves as assistant director of the New Canaan Department of Public Works, recommended this week that the town seek the study from Fairfield-based Frederick P. Clark Associates, with an eye on wrapping it up by midsummer. Police commissioner Paul Foley said: “We are all on the same page that there is a problem and [we want to] solve it and listen to residents.”

Sending traffic one-way down East Maple toward Hoyt Street would preempt the difficulties facing motorists who want to turn onto Main Street, though additional parking problems exist, DiFederico said.

Government

‘The Street Is Basically An Extension of Their Lot’: East Maple Street Neighbors Say Auto Shop Is Causing Traffic Problems

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A Main Street auto shop is treating a residential street next-door as its own parking lot, neighbors say, exacerbating traffic problems and safety hazards on what is already a busy, narrow road. AC Auto Body’s designated parking space on East Maple Street—a privilege enjoyed by the shop because it serves as the designated on-call wrecking service in emergencies—is problematic in that it affects sight lines and pinches the street, according to about a dozen neighbors who addressed members of the Police Commission on Wednesday. The auto shop also abuses the designated spot by parking more than one tow truck on the east side of the street and sometimes using the space for customer vehicles, according to East Maple Street resident David Shea. “The street is basically an extension of their lot,” Shea told the commissioners at their regular monthly meeting, held at the New Canaan Police Department. “This has become a complex parking and traffic situation,” he added, echoing some of the problems he expressed to the same group more than one year ago.