Parking Priorities

It’s nice that members of the Bangor City Council want to help downtown business owners free up parking spaces for their customers. However, it is up to the business owners, not the city, to devise ways to stop employees from taking prime parking spots on the street.

Business owners must realize that it makes sense to keep spaces near their establishments open so that customers can park nearby. If people who work downtown, whether they be lawyers, store clerks or bankers, fill all the spaces in front of their respective offices and stores that leaves no place for their customers to park. If potential clients are driven away because they couldn’t find a place to park, that’s a lost sale.

Other businesses in the area have long understood this. The Bangor Mall has a blue line painted near the mid-section of the parking lots that ring the structure. Employees are asked to park outside the line, saving the spaces closer to the mall for customers.

Of course, it’s not possible to paint a blue line around stores in Bangor, but downtown businesses should encourage their employees to park in the city’s parking garages, which offer more than 1,200 spaces for monthly permit holders. If more than five parking permits are bought at once, a discount applies. The discount gets larger as more permits are purchased.

Many complain that the garages are too far away, as if Pickering Square, the largest lot, was in Veazie. That lot is about a two-minute walk from almost all of the downtown’s major employers. An ad campaign highlighting this has been ongoing since July and the number of cars in the garage has increased since then.

Not only will encouraging – even requiring – employees to park in the garages free up parking for customers, it may turn some employees into customers. Someone walking from their car may stop for a coffee in the morning or browse in a bookstore on the way home. And, of course, a little exercise is good before and after work.

It is odd that in big cities, crowds of people routinely walk several blocks to restaurants, coffee shops, parking garages and even other offices for meetings. Yet, in a small town where the distances to walk are smaller, nearly everyone jumps in a car to travel the equivalent of four blocks.

Business owners should be glad they have this problem. It is a sign of economic health that parking is tight downtown. If there were a lot of open parking spaces, it would mean that customers are scarce. It is a problem they should want to solve on their own.