North Main Parking

Last rainy Tuesday, a few of us tramped out onto North Main Street to take a look at creating parallel parking on the street. David Saladino of RSG measured the street at various places with a measuring wheel. Rich Menge from public works discussed with us the snow storage needs of the Highway Department. Based on the information we had on hand (there is little accurate current information on the right of way along North Main--just those buildings surveyed in the past few years) it would appear that parallel parking is possible, but would require some changes to the sidewalk on the south side of the street. David is going to investigate the lane widths and parking space sizes in Burlington, which has recently revised some of its standards. The issue for Public Works is manpower: they do not have the manpower to keep downtown cleared as often as they would like and therefore need space to store the snow on the street. We talked a bit about the possibility of either adding crew or using private contractors. No conlcusions there. We measured Railroad Row and found the parking spaces were 8 feet and 8.5 feet wide and lanes were at least 12 feet wide. In any case, it would seem like a good idea to encourage including parking on the new master plan that Landworks will produce.