Driving Downtown?

This is downtown Manhattan.

   

This is downtown Syracuse in front of city hall at 6 pm on Wednesday.

     

   

It’s much quieter in Syracuse.

No wonder Mayor Matt Driscoll has proposed a new parking plan that was presented to the Common Council today. The plan will encourage people to spend more time in downtown Syracuse by providing free parking and adding more parking spaces by adopting the reverse diagonal parking system- a system that is relatively new to most people in Central New York.

“It’s a very simple process: 1, 2, 3. You pull up. You stop. You back in.” Commissioner of Public Works Jeff Wright said. Wright was part of Driscoll’s task force that devised the new traffic plan for Syracuse.

He said the reverse diagonal system has been adopted in Seattle and Portland, and it’s a safer system that allows drivers to access their cars from the curb line.

“If you’ve got kids in you pull into the space, you’re opening your car and the kids are heading towards traffic. In this particular case, you open the door, the kids are getting out- they’re heading toward the curb line.”

Wright said the only negative to the system that he can think of is the “getting used to,” but there will be diagrams that teach people how to back their cars into a parking spot to ease the transition.