Back-in parking the way forward?

Oceanside backed its way into the future Tuesday with the debut of its first reverse-angle parking spaces.

The new diagonal spaces — which drivers must back their cars into, taillights first — are the new darlings of city planners but the bane of bad drivers nationwide. Over the past decade, more than a dozen cities across the United States have installed the back-in spots. Although the spaces can slow traffic and mangle bumpers, they create a net gain of downtown spaces compared with parallel parking stalls.

In Baltimore, drivers love them because the re-striping created more parking in its historic downtown. But in Austin, Texas, business owners have launched a petition to return to parallel parking.

Oceanside is one of the first cities in San Diego to try out the newfangled stalls. San Diego is also building back-in parking as part of its 25th Street renovation project in Golden Hill. Solana Beach installed a few spaces in a test program in 2007, but a plan to add more along Highway 101 three years ago met with fierce resistance from business owners.

Officials say reverse parking has several safety benefits. People can load items into their vehicle trunks from the sidewalk, instead of the road; kids exiting the vehicles are shielded from traffic by the open car doors, and drivers have a better view of oncoming traffic, including bicyclists, when pulling out of the spots.

For now, Oceanside officials and business owners are cautiously optimistic about the new traffic feature.

“I’m personally curious to see how it all works,” said Rick Wright, director of MainStreet Oceanside.

The reverse spaces were installed on a new one-way stretch of Mission Avenue between Clementine Street and Coast Highway just west of Interstate 5.

Oceanside added the new spaces as the piece de resistance of its Mission Avenue restoration project, which turned part of the two-way road into a one-way thoroughfare with wider sidewalks and pedestrian seating areas. Parking spots along the north side of the one-way section are back-in only. Spaces on the south side of the street are for parallel parking.

Officials say reverse-angle parking may take a little getting used to, but they say people will adjust.

“If people follow parking laws, it should be pretty easy,” said Oceanside Councilman Jack Feller.

Feller said people who don’t like the back-in spots could parallel park across the street or find other parking on side streets. But he believes people will realize backing in is easier than parallel parking.

Along the street, blue signs with white letters show a diagram of how to back into the spaces: Turn on your right-turn signal light, stop ahead of the space and then back in. Traffic will come to a halt when a car is maneuvering into the space, but Wright said the benefit will be that waiting drivers will have more time to look around and check out local businesses.

“The process of reverse-angle parking slows down traffic, which is the idea,” he said.

Solana Beach experimented with reverse parking seven years ago, but ultimately decided against it.

Back in 2007, the city did a pilot study using about a dozen spots for reverse parking on South Sierra Avenue. The spots are still there and the city has had no complaints, but when it proposed reverse parking as part of a Highway 101 renovation project three years ago, area merchants objected.

“Highway 101 businesses were worried that it would be so novel that it would scare off drivers,” said Solana Beach City Manager David Ott.

The $7 million plan completed last year narrowed highway lanes, widened sidewalks and added more parking, public art and gathering spots. Reverse-angle parking was removed from the project in favor of front-in angle parking.

Ott said the parking spots on Highway 101 could easily be reversed if the city changes its mind in the future. He said the project may have been a little ahead of its time.

“Once people get to know it, they’ll realize it’s a better way to park,” Ott said.

The Oceanside City Council is scheduled to vote today to modify the language of its parking ordinance to include reverse-angle parking.