Whether you were hoping for this or not, here we go. Single-sided parking. It starts Thursday, January 26 at 9 p.m. Make sure your vehicle is parked on the odd side of a residential street or either side of an Emergency Route street. The City has a video explainer and useful visual:

A very important exception to this rule is disability parking. Disability parking spots do not have to follow this rule. At a City-led press conference this morning, Public Works Director Margaret Anderson Kelliher asked the public to submit 311 tickets for disability parking spots on the even sides of streets. These 311 reports with aid in coordination efforts with traffic control.

If, or when, we have another snow storm that requires the City to call for a Snow Emergency, the regular old Snow Emergency rules goes into effect. That means we will move our vehicles around for the three-day cycle and then go back to the odd-side-only parking.

Anderson Kelliher said the City doesn’t have a plan for people to follow in adjusting to single-sided parking but she suggested people work with their neighbors to come up with parking spot solutions.

Anderson Kelliher also noted that Stevens Square has already been practicing single-sided parking to re-plow streets that were prioritized for emergency vehicle access. In other words, tightly packed and densely car-filled streets have been doing single-sided parking for a few days now and it seems to be going ok.

Minneapolis residents haven’t been thrilled, to put it mildly, with the conditions of residential streets since the big snowfall in early January. As we reported earlier this week, parents organized their own single-sided parking to make it easier for school buses to get through.

Here’s to hoping these new parking restrictions ease some of the tensions on the roads. Drive safe and take it easy out there.