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By Max Jaeger
Brooklyn Daily
An erroneous parking sign on Nostrand Avenue is giving locals a lot of grief — even after the city admitted it made a mistake and fixed the problem on June 10.
“This is really causing everybody extra work that we don’t need,” said Christina Carrion, a life-long resident of the block between Avenue P and Quentin Road who now has to spend time appealing a wrongfully issued parking ticket.
The block of Nostrand Avenue is a mix of shops and residences, and the sign was supposed to designate muni-meter parking for a commercial stretch of the avenue between a mid-block apartment building and the corner of Quentin Road to the south, according to Councilman Chaim Deutsch (D–Sheepshead Bay).
But the city changed the signage one night about two weeks ago, replacing a metered-parking sign with a single arrow pointing toward Quentin Road with a two-arrow sign pointing both ways up and down the entire block — leaving apartment dwellers accustomed to free parking on their street with a nasty surprise, locals said.
“When I woke up the next morning every single car had tickets,” said Carrion, who estimated about 12 spots were affected. “We didn’t even know that the sign had changed until that happened.”
The neighborhood lost a dozen parking spots, forcing the apartment’s residents to walk several blocks to and from their cars — sometimes late at night.
“I’m only 21 years old, and it’s not the best neighborhood,” Carrion said.
Residents who continued to park as they had for years got tickets for not feeding the muni-meter.
One group of local tenants brought the tickets to their building superintendant, who then reached out to Deutsch.
The Councilman contacted the Department of Transportation to get the issue fixed, and the agency admitted that the new sign was wrong, according a spokesman for the freshman legislator.
The department swiftly replaced the erroneous sign and told Deutsch’s office it would draft a letter acknowledging the mistake to help people who received summonses fight their tickets or get reimbursed by the city, the spokesman said.