Parking on the Boulevard A letter writer in the Ponte Vedra Recorder of July 11, 2008 demands that �Beach access, parking issues must be resolved.� The notion of parking on the Boulevard is a phony issue of the first order. A demand for parking on the Boulevard could only be made by someone who has either never driven on that road or forcibly closed his or her mind to reality while doing so. First, the road is very narrow. Second, there is a very sensible regulation that there should be a little over 20 feet of space on either side of a driveway to permit clear vision of on-coming traffic for a vehicle entering the road. Now, as you drive down the Boulevard in the disputed stretch from Corona to Solana Road, count the driveways and eyeball 20 feet on each side. Then, figure how many parallel-parked cars you could shoehorn into the remaining space. Not many, right? The letter writer noted that the County gave away 34 feet of utility right-of-way to the Boulevard owners, which would have lessened the public parking problem. I see that move as making little or no difference to this issue. That might have had the benefit of taking the parked cars out of the southbound lane, but for parallel parking, the same 20 foot driveway restriction would hold the spaces for cars to the same small number. If one should ert that, with 34 feet west of the Boulevard, a greater number of cars could angle park, I would ask a dose of common sense. A greater but still relatively small number of cars would have to back out into traffic to depart. In addition, the cars leaving could only go south. It�s not hard to imagine some drivers, headed for Butler Boulevard, attempting to make a backup u-turn to head north. For these safety reasons, the St. John�s County Sheriff�s Department addressed the Ponte Vedra Inn and Club to get rid of the angle spaces on the road in front of its facilities. If one should demand that the County should buy some land and build a parking lot, ask him or her to suggest exactly where, to foot the $2-3 million for the plot and to come up with another pot of gold for the inevitable lawsuit by neighbors determined to avoid having a parking lot next door. No matter where you live, would you want a parking lot next door? If the letter writer wanted to be accurate in his criticism, he should read carefully the County�s Beach Management Plan, which will explain the notion of neighborhood and regional beach access locations and the plan to refurbish the Ponte Vedra Beach access points. There�s more to it than clipping a few hedges. The answer is to make significant improvements to A1A and the Guana lots. Get real!

The comments by Worth are spot on, there is no feasible place for additional parking along Ponte Vedra Blvd. Trying to add more accessibility to this area is pointless. The wisest and easiest plan to implement more beach access for the people from outside the area would be to improve the facilities at the Guana Preserve which is way underutilized. Instead of trying to force more usage into an inappropriate area (PV Blvd.) improvements should be made to encourage more usage of the fine beaches at the Guana Preserve that already have some of the infrastructure already in place to handle large amounts of visitors and their cars. All that is needed at the Guana is improvements in the parking, security, rest rooms and the addition of a concession area for food and snacks and the guana could become a first cl beach area that could accommodate many thousands of beach goers. Even if nothing is done at the Guana, a little bit of promoting this beach area as an alternative to Micklers would help would be beach users by steering them from an overcrowded Micklers to an underused Guana