From the “Nextdoor” app for my city:
From Jerry E.
I’m one of the neighbors whose curb was painted red and I was not notified at all. They just showed up and painted it without any warning…
Has anyone else on Tulare Ave dealt with this or reached out to the city yet? Thank you neighbors for bringing this up and I believe more should bring this up before this becomes a bigger problem.
It irks me (a bit) to see things like this pop up in various forums. People get worked up about a project in their neighborhood, and complain that “I was not notified at all”. Well, yes, you were, you just weren’t paying attention (Unless you moved into the city and that neighborhood in the past week or so).
The City of Visalia is in the process of repaving most of Tulare Avenue. In that project, they’re changing the bike lanes, from ‘class 2’ to ‘class 4’. This improves safety for bicyclists by putting the bike lane next to the curb, and moving parking spaces out from their previous location at the curb to left of the bike lane. This puts parked cars closer to the traffic lanes, and people are freaking out. The redesign also eliminates some parking spaces on the street. People are not happy. Well, some people are not happy. People who ride their bikes are pleased with the changes. It moves them from having cars rushing by at 40 mph right next to them to having parking spaces or parked cars between them and the traffic. It’s a big improvement for safety, especially for children riding their bikes to school or elsewhere.
The complaints are three-fold.
The most vocal are those losing some or all of the on-street parking in front of their residence. They’re really not happy about that, and I can at least understand that attitude. I’ll be losing one of the two available spaces in front of my house when the project reaches me in August. I’ll adapt. Those that lose all of the parking have a legitimate complaint, but it is public property, and the project will improve biking safety. They’ll adapt.
Second are those who worry about parking their cars “out in the street”. The new configuration puts parked cars away from the curb, and closer to the traffic lanes.
They’re worried about the increased chance of a passing car drifting over and hitting their parked cars. This has happened already, but ‘side-swipe’ accidents already occur throughout the city on narrower streets. This is a legitimate concern, also, but you have this risk on many streets you might park on throughout any city. Some also worry about the heavy fog we sometimes get in Visalia.
The third complaint is about having to exit the driver side of the car into a traffic lane. This, too, is something we often have to do when parking in many areas of Visalia. Downtown is particularly bad about this condition. You simply have to be careful.
So that’s the background of the situation. Some nitty-gritty about the process:
The City of Visalia has been sending notices in the mail to residents living on and near Tulare Avenue for years. I first became aware of the project in 2021 or 2022 when a flyer arrived in my mailbox. I filled out an online survey about it at that time. I’ve attended three public information meetings about the plans, one at the Senior Center, one at Christ Lutheran Church, and one at Veva Blunt School. There have been those mailers, social media posts, and numerous discussions (fully noticed 72 hours in advance) at City Council meetings. I’ve spoken during the public comments sections several times about it. The newspapers in the area have carried articles about the changes.
It’s been thoroughly announced, but some folks simply pay no attention to such things until the work crews are tearing up the street in front of their house.
To see people complain that they didn’t know something was happening, and blame the city for not informing them, is just perplexing. I think to myself, “geez, what do you want? For them to spoon-feed you stuff you should already be paying attention to?”
The information has been out there for a long time. It’s not the city’s fault you ignored it.
<end rant>
JimmieJoe / KC6YRU 
Flock Me A Little Bit
May 27, 2026
Jim Reeves commentary, News, Personal ai, ALPR, Flock Camera, License Plate Reader, News, politics, technology, visalia, visalia police department, VPD Leave a comment
The next chapter in our Flock Me series is here! Today I received this email from the Visalia Police Department’s lawyers. (I’m going to have to ask why they have an out-of-town law firm doing this, and not the city attorney.)(UPDATE: It’s not actually an out-of-town firm. It’s a local, Visalia law firm. Not sure why I was thinking it’s an out-of-town company. Oops.)
I’ve sent them an image of my vehicle registration, so I hope to get the images of every time my car has been photographed by the system in Visalia. We’ll see.
Here’s the data on the agencies who can access the Visalia Police Department’s camera system. I’m going to have to study it a bit to figure out exactly what it means, and it does not (so far) answer the question of who *actually* accessed the data. This seems to indicate who is allowed to have access, which is not really what I asked. We’ll see if future information dumps include that little detail.
For those new to the saga of the Flock Automated License Plate Readers, here’s the blog posts I’ve done so far:
What the Flock?
Well, Flock me!
More Flock, more fun
Flock you later
Flock the Lawyers
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