The Access Umstead Committee, which has been politely petitioning for a reversal of the parking ban at the Graylyn Drive neighborhood entrance to Umstead State Park, is working on the same thing at the Reedy Creek Road neighborhood entrance.
The Raleigh City Council on Tuesday removed from its consent agenda a proposal to ban on-street parking in the Trenton Woods neighborhood near the Reedy Creek Road entrance. A council committee will take up the question.
Park lovers warned the council against setting a precedent that could make it easier for other neighborhoods all around Umstead's fringe to bar those pesky parkers, too. Now Access Umstead is inviting its allies to e-mail City Council members with a request that they uproot the dense thicket of No Parking signs (actually planted by NCDOT, not by the city, I think) around the entrance.
Meanwhile I learn on the Access Umstead site that state parks officials have at least tallied the public comments they solicited last fall regarding alternatives for providing new access at the Graylyn gate. Of the 249 people who offered their opinions, 150 favored Alternative C. No word on when, or whether, any of these alternatives will be implemented.
This stuff shouldn't be hard. The barriers really are bureaucratic.
Most state parks are rural; state park officials have been slow to acknowledge the unique needs and the exciting opportunities that come with Umstead's urban setting.
NCDOT is accustomed to playing the lone cowboy. Like the hammer that sees everything else as a nail, DOT is a paving machine that sees Graylyn, Reedy Creek, Trenton and Old Reedy Creek roads as gravel that ought to be covered with asphalt.
So eager were DOT engineers to pave Graylyn, a quiet dead-end road, that they came out on a busy weekend to count scores of park visitors' parked cars -- and then used these numbers to beef up the official traffic counts that determine which gravel roads get paved next.
Then their first action in preparing to pave Graylyn was to ban the parking that had generated the inflated traffic count that had been used to justify paving Graylyn.
City officials haven't covered themselves in glory either.
As a consequence, it's increasingly difficult to get into this big beautiful park.
If you live a few miles from one of these maintenance roads, you can't legally park your car there. If you live a couple of blocks away on Ebenezer Church Road or Trenton Road, it can be dangerous to push a stroller or walk your dog down the narrow paved streets sometimes crowded with those other Umstead users who are just looking for a place to park the car.
Everybody - city and state - says it's not their jurisdiction, not their problem, not their mission, not their way of doing things. Nobody seems to be committed to solving the problem.
Bruce Siceloff reports on traffic and transportation. A News & Observer reporter and editor since 1976, he took over the 
Comments
Hopefully, the city and
Sun, 02/08/2009 - 15:03 — spottydogsHopefully, the city and state will listen and quickly cut through the bureaucratic obstacles to establish additional parking areas as requested at Graylyn and Reedy Creek. DOT's rationale to pave these roads (particularly Graylyn) is more than questionable and DOT should not be allowed to spend additional tax money to pave Old Reedy Creek until a designated parking area has been established.
For me personally, as a Raleigh citizen, I've only been able to go on weekends now due to the extra time (>> 25 minutes roundtrip) required to get to a parking area inside the park. It is very hard for working people to squeeze a workout in with the additional driving time tagged on. Also, I went yesterday afternoon (Saturday) to Raleigh's only entrance off of Glenwood. It took 10 minutes to simply make the left turn into the park off of Glenwood--and cars were stacked 12 deep to exit.