The City of Plymouth has decided to ban parking on Harrison Street from Michigan west to Plum Street. The Board of Works approved the measure Monday.
The city has been trying some different variations of parking restrictions there since April, due to safety concerns with truck and school bus traffic. Over the past couple weeks, the city’s been asking for input from local residents. Two showed up to Monday’s Board of Works meeting.
One spoke in favor of the parking ban, noting that the street often narrows to the point of becoming a one-way road, due to traffic and parked cars. “My wife and I are often first responders to accidents that are in those intersections because people can’t see passed those vehicles, and they’re pulling out and getting hit on the traffic that’s going east and west on Harrison,” he said. “So we’ve gotten to know some of our fellows at the police department pretty well.”
Meanwhile, another member of the public, speaking on behalf of a relative who lives on Harrison Street, opposed the parking ban. He said the reduction in parking spaces would hurt the property values of the affected homes. “As far as having all the problems going on with the trucks and stuff like that, it is wide enough to widen the road,” he said. “We don’t have to do it all at one time. We can do one side of it one year and two years later, do the other side. But that street is wide enough that the city already owns the property. All we have to do is utilize it.”
While board member Mike Delp agreed that widening the road would be an ideal solution, he noted that finding money to do it may be a bit of a challenge, at least for the foreseeable future. But he did note that there is another option. “We can always make it no trucks in there,” he said. “To me, we’ve got North Street, which has better turning radiuses. In a lot of other communities, you set a designated truck route and it may take a little bit to get everybody to go that way, but you send those trucks a different way instead of inconveniencing some of the people that do want that access onto Harrison.”
However, that still leaves the issue of school buses, which use Harrison as a pick-up and drop-off point for students. In spite of Delp’s initial hesitation, the board voted unanimously to ban parking for the entire stretch of road in question, with the idea that a widening project may be considered in the future.
