One parking solution

The thought just came to me over my morning coffee. I was downtown yesterday and spent a long time trying to find parking.

It’s happened to all of us. There you are circling around the block time after time, increasing the radius of your hunt for a parking spot. Ahh, there’s one! Nope, it’s a motorcycle. Darn.

So I came up with this thought. Almost every corner downtown has one of those bulb-out corners. They look nice and made it safer for pedestrians, but we lost a lot of parking spots over them.  

There are those darned signs, “No parking from here to corner.” What if the city of Whitefish took down those signs, and created two diagonal “motorcycle parking only” parking spots.

That would create two additional parking spots at each bulb-out corner. I know that I drive my motorcycle downtown to go shopping, like a quick trip to Nelson’s Hardware. There are also many vacationers that come to Whitefish on their motorcycles and they like to spend time downtown.

It wouldn’t cost the city much to paint the two diagonal spots with “motorcycle parking only” painted on the ground. It wouldn’t take any time at all for the motorcyclists to find those spots and it would free up other parking for cars and trucks. This is not an overall solution to the downtown parking problem, but it would help a little bit.

— Pete Lev