As mentioned before, our road is a private road. That means no city, county or state authority oversees 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: it’s meant only for residents, visitors of said residents, or entities delivering to said residents. Even with signs up at various points along our road, we still get stupid people who don’t live here driving up 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’s very annoying to glance out the windows and see someone parked on the road along our fenceline. Even more annoying was finding their rubbish up there. Shooting at their tires with an 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, 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 too flimsy and didn’t last long in our winter winds.
Then we repurposed some of the railroad ties from the old wall by planting them along the side of the road to keep people from parking 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 empty bottles or fast-food wrappers. Sadly, that just means people are parking elsewhere along the road.
The silver lining is that the replacements I bought for the flimsy NO PARKING signs were too big and heavy to attach to the fence posts, so I donated 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 control on their way down the hill, took out one fence and ended up halfway down the hillside after flying over another four-foot fence.
Like I said, we have a lot of stupid people come up our road.