Alternate Side Parking

The ordinance for Alternate Side Parking for the city of La Crosse went into effect at midnight on November 1^st, 2011 and ends on April 1^st, 2012. This is the third year in a row for a test area exempting the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse campus area. In previous years there has been a lack of compliance, leaving college students paying massive amounts of parking tickets and making it very difficult for the city to remove snow and leaves, and causing the city to enhance notifications.

Notifications are always posted on the City of La Crosse website at least seven hours before removal periods. Otherwise, according to WKBT's website, people can opt to have notifications sent to them through email, text messages, phone calls or Twitter. With text messaging, smart phones and the rising popularity of Twitter the increase in modes of notification is intended to increase compliance. It is highly advised that any residents in the testing area sign up for notifications at www.cityoflacrosse.org/notices. Dale Hexom, Director of Public Works for the city of La Crosse, said, "In past years the number of people that registered for notifications did not approach the number of vehicles parked on the streets in the area."

The city of La Crosse issued the ordinance in the testing area, located from 16^th Street to State Street to West Avenue to La Crosse Street, on September 2009 in an effort to make the removal of snow and leaves easier for city workers. Cited by Second Supper's website, it is very hard to remove snow from the area surrounding UWL's campus because the streets become very narrow, nearly turning into one lane roads in the winter due to cars being parked on both sides of the street. 

During alternate side dates, people are instructed to park their cars on the even side of the street, according to house numbers, on even calendar days and on the odd side of the street, according to house numbers, on odd calendar days. The test area requires people to move their car only when they are notified by the city that snow removal is likely to take place within the next 24 hours.

 Whether residents in the test area actually sign up to receive notifications, or they simply do not comply with the notification requests, there has been a large amount of parking tickets given out in the test area each year. Hexom said that residents in the test area tend to ignore parking tickets, even when multiple tickets are given. He also said, "Apparently some vehicle owners see fines as a form of cheap parking." Cited by WKBT's online, "Compliance is very low in the area, during the past winter, the small, exempt area racked up 1,600 winter parking tickets in the 32 nights alternate side parking was active. The rest of the city only totaled about 4,500 violations."

Many argue that there should be no testing area and the entire city should follow one ordinance concerning alternate side parking – everyone parks their car on the odd or even side according to the calendar every night regardless if snow is going to be removed or not. But as of right now, according to SecondSupper'swebsite, the city will continue to require law enforcement officials to enforce alternate side parking with the one exception.