Drivers won’t be backing into parking spaces on Main Street in Cambria anytime soon

When county crews apply parking-space stripes to the new Main Street pavement surface near Main Street Grill in Cambria’s West Village, probably late this week or next, those spaces will be aligned as they were before the sealcoating work began.

And drivers will continue to park as they always have, pulling into the spaces to park, and backing out to leave.

A “demonstration project” proposal from County Public Works to slant the spaces the other way — so drivers would back into them to park — failed resoundingly at the July 18 North Coast Advisory Council meeting.

In the packed-house council meeting in the Rabobank community room, the proposed project was discussed at length, and then dispatched in a unanimous and rather emphatic “no” vote.

A straw vote of the audience produced the same message: Nearly everybody there didn’t like the prospect of backing into a diagonal parking space from a busy, two-lane street in a downtown business district.

Much of the testimony was passionately serious, some of it funny with show-and-tell, and all of it was vehement.

Mike Britton, transportation planning and operations supervisor for County Public Works, acts as liaison with the council and its traffic committee. He said in an email interview Tuesday that “the county is, indeed, putting the striping back the way it was — that is, we are reinstalling the angled head-in parking.”

When the striping will go in, he said, “is sort of a mixed bag. County crews are out in Cambria, in force, doing a variety of work, including restriping.”

The road crews intend to use longer-lasting thermoplastic for the striping, if and where they can, he said. “However, some of the thermoplastic is on order,” and if it arrives within “the next couple of days, they will install it ASAP.

Otherwise, they will put the striping down in paint, he said.

“In a perfect world,” Britton said, “the striping should all be complete by the end of the week. Worst-case scenario, it should all be complete by the end of the next week.”