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Date: 7/27/2021
NORTHAMPTON – During the Northampton Transportation and Parking Commission’s July 20 meeting, the commission received a presentation from the Main Street for Everyone group that emphasized the need for parallel parking.
Benjamin Weil, a professor of building science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, began his presentation by saying that the group supports parallel parking over angled parking for the redesign of Main Street.
“We think parallel parking is a better choice and the primary reason is that angled parking devotes more space to cars and our proposal to have only parallel parking on Main Street adds much more space for people and for trees,” he said.
In his research, Weil said he discovered that angled parking is 37 percent more dangerous than parallel parking.
“I went to MassDOT’s data, and I excluded all the crashes that had to do with intersections or tall vehicles hitting the railroad bridge. I looked at the parts of Main Street where we have angled parking and parallel parking. What you can see is it is about 37 percent more dangerous where there is angled parking,” he said.
With angled parking, Weil said it becomes more difficult for plowing snow in the winter.
“With this decision to go with angled parking imposes a big additional cost and challenge for removing snow. What we can expect is larger snow events and freezing or thawing events which contribute to potholes. The better we control this snow now, the better off we can prepare for this,” he said.
While one of the concerns with going with parallel parking is a loss of spaces, Weil said that loss is only about 2 percent of the spaces, and the bigger issue is getting people to use the spaces that are already there.
“A switch to parallel parking only loses less than 2 percent of total downtown parking on all the spots. The issue is not that we do not have enough spots, the issue is getting people into them and getting the turnover to happen right,” he said.
For the redesign of Main Street, Weil said the city should focus on safety and implementing newer features such as using a parking app or pay by plate systems.
“With this Main Street redesign, the priority functions for parking should be more accessibility compliant parking spots, short term parking for rapid turnover, which benefits the merchants and the customers, and reserving spaces for commercial vehicles, dynamic pricing, dynamic signage and then integration with a parking app or a pay by plate system,” he said.
With his recommendations, Weil said the loss of some parking spaces would not be a big deal.
“We should advocate for the elimination of angled parking on Main Street because if we implement these other ideas, we have plenty of ways to get people to the parking spaces they need and therefore we do not need the extra spaces,” he said.
The Northampton Transportation and Parking Commission next meets on Aug. 17.