Politics & Government

Herkomer Street Residents Ask for Change in Parking Hours

New Hyde Park residents seek additional restrictions on street.

Residents of Herkomer Street in New Hyde Park are looking to change the parking hours on their street, citing the enormous amount of cars that are constantly parked on the one-way street throughout the day.

A letter with 10 signatures from nine of the 17 homes of the street was received by the New Hyde Park Village Board, requesting that the parking hours currently in place be changed from the current no parking 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. to no parking between 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday to Friday and from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Saturdays. The 4-hour parking rule on all village streets would still apply after those stated hours. There are similar traffic restrictions on adjacent blocks.

The letter also states that the current traffic pattern “caused by the current parking hours creates a single lane of passable traffic, making it hard during peak times, making it hard just to enter and exit our driveways due to train station and commercial traffic.”

Find out what's happening in New Hyde Parkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

“I drove down that block today and it is completely loaded with cars,” deputy mayor Robert Lofaro said during the November 20 meeting of the board at the village hall, “more than any other street in the whole area.”

Superintendent of public works Tom Gannon said that the vehicles parked on the street are not related to commuter traffic, having asked code enforcement to monitor the situation

Find out what's happening in New Hyde Parkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

“Cars move enough to switch spots, relocate; they’re moving their car every few hours,” he said. “They are in the area that they are able to go back to their car and relocate it to another spot on the street. They may even be switching spots with each other.”

To his recollection, Lofaro said that the current restriction had to do with activity at New Hope Community Church interfering.

“They also felt that the commuter issue would be over by then,” he noted.

While the deputy mayor said that he was not adverse to changing the parking restrictions, mayor Daniel Petruccio said that the board was also considering alternate side of the street parking in hopes of opening up another lane of traffic.

“I would really like to have a discussion with them how to best, we definitely want to solve the problem for them but we want to make sure that we’re not going to be requested three months from now to change it to something different because this didn’t work,” Petruccio said, asking Gannon to put together a survey to every home with several options and mentioning that any parking restriction would affect the residents as well as those parking.

“They may say ‘listen, I park my car in my driveway anyway, it doesn’t matter to me’,” Petruccio theorized. “That I would understand too as well.”

Neighboring Plaza Avenue has voucher parking on one side with little to no parking on the other side. South Park Place also has stringent parking restrictions.

“I’m telling you, it’s really a weird phenomenon,” Lofaro said. “It’s like that one block is loaded with cars every day. If it was commuters – the late commuters – I’d have an issue with that, that were bypassing the voucher zones and so on.”


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here