Almost every spring, summer and fall weekend for the past several years, gangs of hot-rodders, dragsters and motorcycle fiends have amused themselves with late-night street races, noisy motorcades and outdoor drinking parties around Highway 280.
The racket they make can be heard throughout the residential neighborhoods along Como Avenue and in adjacent St. Anthony Park and Lauderdale.
These louts have been repeatedly and insolently disturbing the peace for years on end.
Here on the first weekend of April, I counted approximately 40 cars, pick-up trucks and motorcycles performing their stunts. I witnessed street-racing on 280; revving engines and blasting (glass-pack?) mufflers; and motorcading back and forth for hours, including the practice of serially whipping through stop signs as they swing around to reverse their direction. The disturbance begins not long after dark and sometimes doesn’t cease until 3 and sometimes 4 a.m. on Friday, Saturday, and often Sunday nights.
By late spring or mid-summer, there are scores of cars, trucks and cycles involved, and hundreds of people, often congregated in parking lots along the Kasota Avenue/Energy Park Drive vicinity, where drag matches are staged.
Can’t anything be done about it? It has cost me many nights of lost sleep, even with windows closed in spring, summer and fall; and I’m sure there are other victims.
I’d like to hear from other neighbors to see if this can be solved. Here are a few suggestions for discouraging these troublemakers: Speed bumps on Kasota-Energy Park would help, simple security measures for the business parking lots like weekend chains across their entrances, occasional saturation patrols by law enforcement, and maybe a few mass drive-in events by local residents in order to outnumber and disperse the interlopers.
We’ve put up with this constant breach of the peace for far too long. I’d like to see our civic authorities fulfill their responsibility to reestablish order.
Oliver Steinberg, St. Anthony Park, vonlogau@gmail.com
