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.

Around Town

Neighbor: Parked Cars Pinching East Maple Street So Much It’s Become ‘Pretty Unbearable’

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An increasing number of parked and double-parked cars pinch East Maple Street so tightly up toward Main that it no longer functions as a two-way street, one longtime resident told traffic officials this week. According to David Shea, who has lived on East Maple for 23 years, commercial traffic brought in part by the relocated New Canaan Cleaners—combined with some employees, all-day-parking rail commuters and a lack of parking regulations—has exacerbated the situation in the past five months so that it’s become “pretty unbearable.”

“If somebody starts coming up and you’ve got that channel of cars, [then] somebody has got to back up—otherwise, nobody is getting through,” Shea said Wednesday during the Police Commission’s meeting, held in the Training Room at the New Canaan Police Department. He requested that the commission conduct a traffic flow study and make recommendations that may include creating new, enforceable regulations for the Parking Bureau or possibly making the street—a popular cut-through between Hoyt and Main—a one-way street. Police commissioners asked for a rundown on current parking regulations. On one side of the street, Shea said, there’s 2-hour parking between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays.