Drivers headed to Main Street during the busy stretches may have to circle a few times before they find a parking spot.City Hall someday could eliminate that need and instead offer a valet service for people wanting to park in the Main Street core.A group that is studying the future of Main Street and nearby locations that support the operations of the shopping, dining and entertainment strip in September discussed parking issues and touched on the possibility of introducing a valet service. The Main Street Area Plan Committee did not appear to delve into the details of a concept, but the talk about a valet service was nonetheless notable since such a service, if launched, would be a consequential addition to the municipal government’s parking and transportation strategies.The draft minutes of a meeting in early September include a brief summary of the discussion about valet parking. One of the committee members “suggested that valet parking could help address the issue that drivers circulate on Main Street searching for spots, even while nearby parking structures are underutilized,” the draft minutes show.“Valet drivers would make it convenient for people to drop off their car and let someone else park it in the structure,” they say.The draft minutes added: “Committee members expect that people will be happy to pay a higher price for parking if they do not need to look for parking.”Numerous operational details would need to be crafted before a valet system could be introduced. Some of them include the locations where valet drivers would pick up vehicles along Main Street, pricing, the hours of operation and where valet drivers would park the vehicles. Parking in the Main Street core has challenged City Hall leaders for decades. A paid-parking system was introduced in the late 1990s, a dramatic step at the time, in an effort to better manage parking. There have been alterations over the years to the paid parking system, but it remains one of the key management tools.City Hall over time added parking spaces in the Main Street core, such as a major expansion of the China Bridge garage, but there are still times when finding a spot on or close to Main Street is difficult.The Main Street Area Plan Committee, meanwhile, also addressed the possibility of creating a park-and-ride lot as another solution. One of the members of the committee “noted that the parking is most used on days when most visitors are traveling from Salt Lake City,” the draft minutes say.“If high-quality transit enables people to travel from the park n’ ride without getting stuck in traffic – such as with a gondola or bus lanes – it could enable Salt Lake City visitors to reach Main Street faster than they can by car,” they say.Some of the discussion apparently was influenced by the possibility of reducing the number of parking spots on Main Street as part of redesigns. Two of the passages from the draft minutes addressing that issue are:“Committee members report that business owners express concern about losing parking spots, and that this is the ‘number one’ concern they hear. One member worries that people won’t come to Main Street if they hear ‘they reduced parking.’” “Another noted that Main Street’s structured parking lots are often under-capacity even during the busiest days of the year. This suggests that the street’s primary challenge may not be the absolute number of parking spots, but how convenient they are to use.”The Main Street Area Plan Committee has not finalized its recommendations. There are expected to be discussions with the mayor and the Park City Council in November and a public-input session that month.The post Park City parking solutions could include valet service appeared first on Park Record.