Holiday crowd gets tickets instead of fireworks
Just before 6 p.m. on July 4th, I counted around 40 cars parked illegally on the shoulders of scenic Riverside Drive between Pony Pasture and the Z-Dam as the holiday crowds celebrated at the James River and camped out expecting to see fireworks downriver. As people crowded the south bank of the James, two Richmond police […]
Just before 6 p.m. on July 4th, I counted around 40 cars parked illegally on the shoulders of scenic Riverside Drive between Pony Pasture and the Z-Dam as the holiday crowds celebrated at the James River and camped out expecting to see fireworks downriver.
As people crowded the south bank of the James, two Richmond police officers were ticketing heavily at Z-Dam and Riverside Meadow Greenspace, where about 20 cars were parked on private property. Unlike July 3 when I observed police officers merely asking about 80 drivers who had parked on the Manchester Bridge to move along, these officers were not playing around.
The parking lot at Pony Pasture was full and there were eight cars in line to get in at 5:45 p.m., which is late for any high-volume day. Nathan Burrell, trails manager for the James River Park, was running the gate at Pony Pasture and said that it had been steady most of the afternoon. Just after 6 p.m., Burrell finally cleared the line and called it a day for himself, saying he had seen enough after a hard three-day holiday weekend.
From what I could tell, the spill-0ver crowd that couldn’t wait to get in to Pony Pasture must have been trying their luck to not get ticketed, or maybe the first couple of scofflaws encouraged the rest of the crowd to give it a try. Either way, there were several people trying to reconcile the tickets, and I overheard one spanish-speaking family say that they didn’t know how they were going to pay the ticket (unknown fine). Many of the ticketed drivers I witnessed looked to be hispanic.
The roadway is clearly marked with no parking signs in several key areas, but because the road is a scenic byway, there isn’t a no parking sign to cover every inch of the two miles of Riverside Drive between Huguenot Flatwater and Pony Pasture.
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