Community members say an old problem is just getting worse at South Mission Beach Surf Park.
Residents are capturing on video after video of parades of cars driving on the boardwalk after the parking lots are closed.
The footage looks more like Mission Boulevard than the Mission Beach Boardwalk. Neighbors wish it was the other way around.
“Someone is going to get hit looking the wrong way and they are just going to get plowed over,” neighbor and Mission Beach Town Council member Marty Zimmerman said.
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Footage from a surveillance camera along the boardwalk captured a dozen cars and SUV's driving at various rates of speed on the boardwalk within just a few minutes. Zimmerman said the cars come from the south mission beach surf park
“It’s pretty clear they have no idea where they are going,” Zimmerman said.
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Several signs on the lot say it closes at 10 p.m., but the after-hours crowd still gets stuck behind the locked gates.
Boardwalk traffic is a long-time complaint. Zimmerman has photographs from last year of vehicles stuck in the sand trying to get out.
For law enforcement and the city’s part, Zimmerman said they’ve tried. They installed giant boulders -- too big for one person to move -- and they even anchored them, but as you can see they've been moved in the past. Concrete coal bins and concrete trash cans were also installed. They are all barriers that have been defeated.
Zimmerman said new bollards were installed at entrances to the board walk just this week.
NBC 7 reached out to SDPD Northern Division about the issue but has not yet heard back.
“At that rate, that many, that often is way above anything I have seen before," Zimmerman described.
Residents hope the bollards do a better job of keeping traffic in the street and off the board walk, but Zimmerman said the solution is a bigger police presence.
“Just be here. Just drive through the parking lot. I have found when they do that on the nights they are here, it's amazingly quiet,” he said.
