Business

King Street parking idea draws questions

The Hendersonville City Council is scheduled to take up a public works proposal to add parallel parking on the west side of the 200 and 300 blocks of King Street.

By Bill Moss, Published: December 2, 2014

Although engineers are proposing a way to add 20 parking spaces downtown, the idea is sure to draw questions from the Hendersonville City Council this week.

In an effort to add more spaces to the tight inventory of parking downtown, the city hired an engineering firm to study parallel parking on the west side of King Street. J.M. Teague Engineering completed a traffic impact on King Street from Second Avenue to Sixth Avenue "to see if we could change from a three-lane, one-way layout to a two-lane, one-way layout with on-street parking," Public Works Director Tom Wooten said in a memo to the council.
The engineers concluded that the city could add parking in the 200 and 300 blocks, creating 20 spaces. Removing the left travel lane in the 400 and 500 blocks would cause a stacking problem where "traffic will back up into the upstream intersection causing traffic congestion," Wooten said.
Teague Engineering presented the study to DOT engineers, who agreed the on-street parallel parking could be added to two blocks of North King Street. The estimated cost to stripe the road for parking is $3,000.
"As of right now, I don't like it at all," Councilman Jeff Miller said Monday.
Miller, whose dry-cleaning business is in the 400 block, said it appeared to him that parking would create a hazard for pedestrians getting out on the passenger side and also would stop or delay traffic in the left lane waiting for cars to back into parallel parking slots.
The consultant's conceptual plan shows that the parking lane would be 9 feet 6 inches wide, the center lane 12 feet 8 inches and the right lane 11 feet.