The state Division of Parks and Recreation toyed for a year with the idea of opening a third automobile entrance to Umstead State Park (at Graylyn Drive), and it received a few hundred comments expressing sharp opinions on both sides.

The Raleigh City Council's Public Works Committee struggled this year with calls to erect "No Parking" signs in residential neighborhoods where Umstead users leave their cars There were sharp, competing opinions here, too.

State and city agencies helped create these problems. The Umstead maintenance gate at the corner of Trenton and Reedy Creek Roads became an even more appealing destination for park users after the city and the state extended the Reedy Creek Greenway west from the NC Museum of Art -- and stopped it there. The closest parking lot is two miles away at the art museum.

NCDOT banned parking on the state roads outside the Graylyn and Reedy Creek Road maintenance gates -- after it justified paving Graylyn by using high traffic counts that had been generated by those same parked cars.

Both the city and the state are wary of taking steps that will set uncontrollable precedents, cost money and perhaps create new sets of environmental, legal and political problems.

So the parks division refused this week to open the Graylyn gate. And the city council said ... [MORE]

Runners and cyclists hoping for easier access to the state's busiest urban state park lost ground today:

State officials said they won't turn dead-end Graylyn Drive into a third automobile entrance to Umstead State Park.

And the Raleigh City Council prepared to post more No Parking signs on neighborhood streets near an Umstead gate on Reedy Creek Road. [Update 5 p.m. Tuesday: The council delayed action on the No Parking proposal, sending the matter back to committee for more deliberation.]

Lewis Ledford, the state parks director, announced a plan to improve a bumpy gravel road inside the park that provides access from the Glenwood Avenue entrance to the Sycamore Bike and Bridle Trailhead (see map). The road will be paved when funds are available, and the trailhead parking lot will be expanded.

He rejected an option, floated a year ago, to let park patrons drive to the same trailhead on what is now a maintenance road with a locked gate at the end of Graylyn Drive off Ebenezer Church Road.

“Our overriding philosophy must be to minimize the development footprint at Umstead as one way to protect the wild and natural landscape of this state park,” Ledford said in a news release. ... [MORE]

There's a long list of things you can't bring into Carter-Finley Stadium for Saturday's U2 show, including food, drink containers, bags, backpacks, bottles, artificial noise-makers, video cameras, large flags, weapons and so on. But you'd better bring a sizable quantity of cash, which you'll have to start handing over before you even get inside.

According to the Ticketmaster update that went out to ticket-holders this week, parking at the U2 show will cost $20 per car -- multiples more than what usually gets charged for non-VIP concert parking around these parts. If you want to drive to the show in your RV, that will cost an even steeper $40.

A Live Nation spokesperson declined comment when asked who had set the price.

"That money will be part of the concert settlement," says Shannon Yates, assistant athletic director for game operations at Carter-Finley. "It will be used for various facility upgrades in the athletic department."

Football fans leaving Saturday's NCSU game with Murray State should watch out for officers who will be pointing to unfamiliar exit routes from some Carter-Finley Stadium parking lots.

The new egress routes should speed the flow and get fans home sooner, NCSU said today. The plan is intended to send all exiting traffic away from the stadium, and to avoid sending any lanes back into other exiting traffic.

Cars leaving Gate B will turn south along Youth Center Road, then right onto Hillsborough Street.

Cardinal Gibbons traffic will exit from the rear of the lot onto Trinity Road only, and not onto Edwards Mill Road. The NCSU veterinary college parking lot will empty onto Hillsborough instead of Blue Ridge Road.

West Chase traffic will be reduced from three to two lanes before it turns left onto Blue Ridge.

Read the detailed plan for all parking lots here.

Documents:

The jury is still out on a proposal by Mark Hangen to protect cars in RDU's parking garage by hanging cookie sheets from the ceiling above them.  

But one reader of today's story on the RDU mystery goop went out and tried Hangen's tip for cleaning her gooped-up car -- et voilà! No more goop!

I've parked at RDU a lot over the last 5 years. I had some of this goop on my car, but I did not know where it came from until I started seeing articles about it in the N&O. Washing and waxing never removed the goop. This morning I tried the lemon juice suggestion that was mentioned in the article above. It worked perfectly and easily. The goop is gone. -- bgriset

Previous clean-up tips mentioned a home product called Lime A-Way. But this stuff has been reported to turn steel black, so be careful.

Conservatives may speak of Chapel Hill as "the people's republic of Chapel Hill," and N.C. State fans may view the place as the devil's playground, and the Duke folks...well, never mind. But in one area, at least, the town is doing something that other cities...make that, Raleigh...could stand to copy.

Those who "earn" a parking ticket in the town get one free pass, a "courtesy ticket," per year so far as violating the rules on metered parking goes. This is making some good will, The News & Observer's Alicia Banks reports, particularly since that instead of a ticket, there's a note left that says, "Thank you for visiting downtown Chapel Hill." 

I'll grant you Chapel Hill may be smaller by "and then some" than the Capital City and the money the town's losing can be easily absorbed in the budget. But Chapel Hill has a tremendous surplus of cars. In fact, during my orientation as a freshman student there some years back, one speaker said Chapel Hill had more cars per capita than any place in the United States. I don't know if that was the truth, or the ramblings of some guy who'd been towed on his way to give the speech. But it's a problem.

So this brings us to Raleigh, where the objective in downtown parking seems to be trying to compete with Ticketmaster. My friend Thad Woodard, president of the state Bankers Association, has long been the sort of Davy Crockett of parking, advocating an end to parking meters. I once tried to get him to chain himself to a meter in protest, but he wouldn't quite go for it, particularly when I told him I'd have to deny suggesting it if he threw my name out once they took him to jail. 

Why couldn't Raleigh give people a pass once a year? And no matter how many answers to that question officialdom might come up with, the truth is it's not as if we're letting somebody off of a felony, for goodness sakes. 

Well, unless the City Council has indeed made it a felony to go past the allotted time...

Your odds are still excellent for parking at RDU and getting away clean.

Almost 2 million cars park there every year. Fewer than 2 dozen car owners file damage claims each year after finding their cars splattered with mystery goop (see Tuesday's story with lots of reader comments) that is hard or impossible to remove. It's nasty enough to damage paint, glass and chrome, but fortunately it is relatively rare.

An RDU consultant is still working out what the cause of this problem is, and searching for a fix that won't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

While we wait for the report, we already have ideas from dozens of travelers and other readers from across the United States who read about the yucky stuff this week. They reported similar problems at parking garages in Florida, Wisconsin, Colorado, Tennessee, California and New York.

What is it? Here are the theories: ... [MORE]

Of course Phil Stork isn't the only guy out there who prefers to drive headlong into a parking spot, instead of backing in.

But everyone who responded initially to his comments on this weighty issue happened to be of the opposite persuasion (see today's Road Worrier column, with reader comments).

Now, a few head-first types are piping up to cast their votes with Stork.

The logic is weird. Worried about running over a kid or a dog? This could happen while you are backing into the space! -- Clayton47

Anyone who thinks backing into a parking place is a good idea needs to be in a line of five or so cars while waiting for some incompetent to make three or four tries backing into a space. It gets worse if you are number five in line and everyone of the cars in front of you also back in.

I won't burden you with my age but I have been backing out longer than you likely have been alive and narry an accident. Seems to me the problem lies in carelessness more than anything else. -- Conner Atkeson

Here are some quick updates from today's committee of the whole meeting.

The school board agreed to make the Graduation Project optional for the Class of 2010. Students who voluntarily complete the project will be able to wear a cord at graduation and receive a notation on their transcript.

But the board asked staff to draft it up so that it would be a graduation requirement in 2011 even if the state delays implementation again.

Lots of comment today, and still some confusion, about North Carolina’s handicapped parking laws and how they are abused (see Road Worrier column with reader comments).

Lax law enforcement is the main problem, says Christina Ulrich, who has had a placard for 28 years and carries a registration card that identifies her as the registered person:

The law does not enforce any of the rules in the first place. Half the time nobody has a handicapped card yet they park in a handicapped spot. And the law enforcement rides right by, and they don’t write a ticket. If these people got tickets they would stop parking where they don’t belong in the first place.

Annie Formo of Wilson, whose husband has a handicapped placard, agrees.

I believe that most police officers have the ability to approach drivers to question their handicap. If there is an ID card the problem would be simple. The big problem is with the indignant people who already know they are guilty and I am sure an officer could handle that problem.

It certainly is true that enforcement is spotty and inconsistent. In Raleigh's downtown central business district, for example, ... [MORE]