As mentioned before, the road we live off of is a private road. That means no city, county or state authority oversees the management of said road. (There is actually one “main road” with three roads that fork off it farther up the mountain.)
A private road means just that though: it’s only meant for residents, people visiting said residents or making deliveries to residents. Even with some signs up at various points along our road, we still get stupid people who don’t live here driving up here to smoke pot, drink beers and leave garbage as they admire the view. (Thankfully we haven’t had any major illegal dumping issues since the cleanup work I organized a few summers back.)
Still it was very annoying to glance out the windows and see someone parked up on the road along our fenceline. Even more annoying was finding their rubbish up there. Shooting at their tires with the air rifle didn’t seem like a smart thing to do, so we tackled the ongoing problem with two tools. First some signs from MyParkingSigns.com. Usually I use BuildASign.com for things, but these were ready-made so I didn’t have to try to make anything witty.
The signs read:
“NO PARKING
NO STANDING
NO STOPPING
What part of NO don’t you understand?”
We put three of these signs along the fenceline, along with three simple NO PARKING signs which sadly were a bit too flimsy and didn’t last long thanks to our winter winds. Then we repurposed some of the railroad ties from the old wall. We lined them up along the side of the road to keep people from trying to park there.
I’m happy to report that our approach seems to be working. We almost never have anyone up there and it’s been quite a while since we’ve found any empty bottles or fast-food wrappers up there. Sadly, that just means people are parking elsewhere along the road.
The silver lining is that, when I bought replacement signs for the flimsy No Parking ones that didn’t last, the signs I received were too big and heavy to easily attach to the fence posts, so I’ve been donating them to various neighbors who seem to experience the worst of the stupid loitering strangers.
Unfortunately one of the signs didn’t even last a day. Seems a non-resident managed to lose it on their way down the hill. Not only did they take out the fence but they ended up halfway down the hillside after flying over a four-foot fence.
Like I said, we have a lot of stupid people come up our road.