“Parking in Hanover is convenient and easy!”
Or so proclaims the town’s website.
This declaration strikes us as aspirational, exclamation point notwithstanding. But even if it is meant to be taken literally, it’s hard to imagine anything more likely to outrage people who live, work, shop or dine in downtown Hanover than the removal of 28 existing on-street parking spaces.
That reduction is being proposed as part of a $15 million infrastructure project planned for three blocks of South Main Street, from Wheelock Street to Dorrance Place. The projected work, based on a preliminary design by Bowman Engineering, a national firm with an office in Etna, includes replacement of water and sewer lines, drainage improvements, underground electrical work and sidewalk replacement.
The intent is to phase-in the work to minimize disruption, but the project will no doubt constitute a massive, though necessary, headache for downtown businesses and the people who patronize them. In the end, though, it stands to improve the streetscape as well as make infrastructure in the area safer and more reliable.
Unfortunately, it also proposes to reconfigure on-street parking to meet current design and safety standards, reducing the number of spaces from 62 to 34. Parking on the west side of South Main Street would go from diagonal to parallel because, according to Town Manager Robert Houseman, the current diagonal parking configuration on both sides poses a problem: Large vehicles tend to stick out into both travel lanes.
Predictably, business owners interviewed by our colleague Sofia Langlois were dismayed by the prospect of losing the spaces. Jennifer Packard, owner of Molly’s Restaurant, raised a representative objection. “The number one concern Upper Valley customers voice to me as a business owner, as the reason they don’t come to Hanover, is parking,” she said.
Indeed, parking — or the lack thereof — has been a contentious issue in Hanover for at least 40 years. The rise of online shopping and high commercial rents were key factors in the slow decline of the downtown as a bricks-and mortar retail destination, but the difficulty of parking certainly played a role as well.
Houseman believes that parallel parking will be no more onerous than trying to back out of a diagonal space. We readily concede that it’s no day at the beach trying to peer around a giant SUV with tinted glass windows while backing out into traffic. But we are also well acquainted with people who couldn’t parallel park if their life depended on it, at least not without a few attempts.
“Parallel parking, a lot of the time, isn’t even taught to young drivers,” Packard said. Older drivers, who, if they ever learned, are long out of practice might fall into that category as well.
Statistics suggest that the town’s nearby parking garage is underutilized and could fill the void created by the extinction of the South Main Street spots. But the garage, with its narrow parking spaces, can be difficult to navigate, as well as being dank and dark.
This project has a long way to go before it becomes a reality, including vetting by the Selectboard with a public forum to follow and an eventual Town Meeting vote. So there’s time to explore alternatives. Perhaps there aren’t any good ones. But leaving diagonal parking intact while simply banning oversized SUVs and pickups from on-street parking in that three-block area would preserve parking spots and promote the environmental goal of discouraging gas-guzzlers. Reserving super-sized parking spaces elsewhere for those vehicles might be an attractive way to ease the sting of their banishment. To the likely objection that such a solution would be impractical, it seems to us no more so than wiping out 45% of those downtown parking spaces.