On Gittings Avenue in North Baltimore, there's a tradition: You park on the sidewalk.
For decades, the residents there have placed two wheels on the street and two on the curb out of necessity. Their street, built before the proliferation of automobiles, is simply too narrow for large vehicles to pass through if they don't. Residents worry about ambulances and fire engines not being able to get down the street.
But last year, this quirky tradition on this oddly shaped road caught the attention of the city's traffic officers. And for residents in the Lake Walker neighborhood, that wasn't a good thing.
At first, the tickets cost $52 and, for the most part, the busy residents decided to pay up rather than fight them in court. This year, the fines got raised to $77.
"It's been going on for over a year," says a frustrated Eileen Gwin, president of the Lake Walker Community Association. "The residents in the community have been parking like this forever."
The neighbors have persuaded Councilman Bill Henry to help them fight back. Henry, who has called for a City Council hearing on the matter Nov. 16, said the city's Transportation Department has refused to stop ticketing the residents.
The city's traffic control officers will continue handing out the tickets unless Maryland law is changed, said Adrienne Barnes, a spokeswoman for the Baltimore Department of Transportation.
"Our job is to enforce the law that is currently in place, and we will continue to do so," she said. "If the law changes, we will enforce the new law."
Henry has asked state lawmakers to amend Maryland law.
"In a perfect world, enforcement would be different," Henry said. "We've been told that's not an option."
Barnes said the tickets given out in the past year are a result of officers conducting their rounds, not part of a targeted plan.
"While some citations are complaint-driven, the majority of citations are issued by Parking Control Agents monitoring areas as they move about on a rotational basis," she said.
'A problem that can't wait'
After being contacted by Henry, state Del. Curt Anderson said this week he plans to contact transportation officials and ask them to suspend the ticketing until the issue is resolved legislatively.
"It's a problem that can't wait for several months of hearings in Annapolis," he said.
On Tuesday, Anderson sent out an aide to meet with the residents. He said he wanted to make sure there wasn't some other alternative, such as widening the road, because lawmakers are sometimes hesitant to change state law to benefit a few blocks of people.
Henry's resolution doesn't call for a change in state law that specifically benefits Lake Walker, but asks for the city to have wider discretion in setting traffic rules for individual neighborhoods.
"The city needs the authority to implement neighborhood-specific programs to allow for parking partially on the sidewalk or against the flow of traffic," he wrote.
Henry said the bill would include roads, such as Gittings Avenue, that are too narrow to allow through traffic when the cars are parked along both sides of the street; roads that have mountable curbs; and areas in which more than 80 percent of households agree with the change in the law, such as a part of Homeland where residents prefer to park against the flow of traffic.
"While this tweaking of Baltimore's residential parking program will not end the parking wars, it will at least bring about a cease-fire in some of our most embattled neighborhoods," he wrote in the resolution.
Residents feel 'violated'
Since last year, Wendie Cassini has received three tickets on Gittings Avenue and says she feels "violated."
"It's very disturbing to continue to see yourself getting ticketed for parking in front of your own home," she said. "I'm very upset. No one deserves to get ticketed for this."
Despite her feelings, Cassini, like most residents of the neighborhood, decided simply to pay the tickets. One neighbor, Bob Tickner, contested the ticket in court — and won.
Tickner, who has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years, doesn't understand why traffic agents only recently took interest in their unique parking situation.
"Why all of the sudden are we getting ticketed when this has happened for 30 years?" he asked.
Another resident, Kathy Brohawn, says she's growing frustrated with waiting for a change to the law. She said her community association met with delegates more than a year ago, but has yet to see proposed state legislation come to fruition.
Meanwhile, she says, more of her neighbors keep getting tickets.
"Since then, there's been no resolution," she said. "My fear is they're going to forget about us."
twitter.com/lukebroadwater