If you haven’t noticed yet, the city’s winter overnight street-parking ban has been put off until the first major snowstorm.
The delay reflects a change in city policy that did away with an old, seemingly arbitrary deadline that banned overnight parking outside downtown Bangor starting Nov. 1.
Instead, the ban will take effect the day of the first emergency downtown parking ban, which the city calls for major weather events that require city snow removal.
Otherwise, city parking rules are unchanged. As in previous years, once the ban goes into effect, cars outside the downtown parking management district won’t be allowed to be parked on the street between midnight and 6 a.m.
That prohibition will last until March 31.
For major storms after that, city officials can call emergency bans on a case-by-case basis, Lt. Bob Bishop said Tuesday.
Downtown remains exempt from rules applying to the rest of the city, and overnight parking remains permitted there year-round, except for during emergency storm bans.
Those are announced on the city’s website, as well as on flashing street signs, and through phone and text alerts, which you can sign up for online.
Emergency bans aren’t set for uniform lengths of time and depend on the severity of the storm. That said, Bishop said most bans don’t go into effect until close to midnight, when plows do the bulk of their work.
During emergency downtown bans, residents are allowed to park their cars from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. under the Columbia Street Parking Deck or under the Pickering Parking Garage, but vehicles left on the street during snow bans will be towed at the owner’s expense.
City councilors have been mulling the change for months before passing it unanimously in August, according to Councilor Gibran Graham.
Bangor rarely sees a storm by Nov. 1, Graham said.
“As you can see from this year, it’s Nov. 14 and we haven’t had weather that would prevent us parking on the street,” he said.
But some residents might still be inconvenienced, since the ban limits the number of overnight parking spaces for a large portion of the year, Lt. Bishop acknowledged. It’s especially difficult for renters with limited off-street options and who typically rely on street parking for overnight guests, he said.
Asked why most of the city doesn’t follow the same emergency-basis rule that govern the downtown, he said the continuous overnight ban is necessary to “condition people to find alternative places to park, or put them in a driveway.”
Without it, he estimated that enough people in the city’s neighborhoods would forget to move their cars off the streets during snowstorms, resulting in an obstacle course of “choke points” for plow trucks trying to navigate narrow streets.
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