AMHERST – Visitors unfamiliar with parking in downtown Amherst now should have an easier time finding spaces in parking lots and the Boltwood parking garage.
Five new banners, each 8 feet tall with white lettering on a blue background, were installed on poles on downtown streets Wednesday morning.
Department of Public Works employees, using a bucket truck, put the banners in place at five sites on South Pleasant, North Pleasant and Amity streets.
Senior Planner Jeffrey Bagg said these new banners and mounting hardware, which cost $1,800, is the first phase of a long-awaited effort to get more consistent parking signs in place.
“We thought it was important to get something up for graduation,” Bagg said.
Commencement at the University of Massachusetts is May 6, at Hampshire College on May 14 and Amherst College on May 22.
Two banners on Amity Street and one on South Pleasant Street are near parking lots and read “parking,” while the two banners on North Pleasant Street near the intersection with Kellogg Avenue read “garage,” referring to the Boltwood parking garage that has an entrance from Kellogg. Each banner also has a white circle enclosing a “P” at the top, with white directional arrows at the bottom.
Supplementing the banners are two metal signs, both blue with a white “P,” fabricated by the DPW, one put at the entrance to the Pray Street parking lot off East Pleasant Street, the other at the entrance to the Town Hall parking lot off Main Street.
More of these may be made to replace other parking signs that do not use the blue-and-white color scheme, Bagg said.
Bagg said more banners will be ordered, but these cannot be installed yet. A project at the north end of downtown, in which utilities are being put under ground, needs to be completed first.
The new signs come out of a parking report based on three community forums held in 2014 and 2015.
The town is now awaiting results of a parking data collection led by NelsonNygaard Consulting Associates of Boston. The consultant will provide an updated inventory of all public and private spaces in the downtown area, which is bounded by the University of Massachusetts campus to the north, Lincoln Avenue to the west, the Amherst College campus to the south, and Dickinson and Triangle streets to the east.
A Downtown Parking Working Group to examine the parking report and make recommendations to the Select Board is not yet in place, but Bagg said potential members are being interviewed.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
