Effective Sept. 7, vehicles with Boston resident stickers will no longer be allowed to park in metered or two-hour parking spaces, thus ending a practice that the city put in place at the beginning of the pandemic.
“Beginning September 7, 2021, residents with a resident permit sticker will no longer be allowed to park in a metered or two-hour parking space, without having to adhere to the time limit or pay a meter fee, within their specific neighborhood,” Boston Transportation Department spokesperson Eugenia Soiles wrote in an email. “All operations will be back to normal after Labor Day, so we encourage residents to read signs and be mindful of all posted regulations when they are parking in the city.”
On the heels of this announcement, Elliott Laffer, who chairs the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, said he hopes this change in the city’s parking policy bodes well for the proposed creation of additional residential parking spaces in that neighborhood.
“The program in place has provided an additional parking resource for residents,” he said, “but as always, there are more residential stickers than there are physical places to park on streets in the Back Bay.”
Laffer said NABB is now in discussions with the city about potentially re-capturing some residential parking spaces on the “long streets” in the Back Bay, such as Commonwealth Avenue, Marlborough Street, and Beacon Street, which are mostly dedicated to residential parking, but had some meters installed in the 1980s.
“We are looking to have some of those metered spaces – the number is unclear, but it could be fairly considerable – turned back into residential spaces,” said Laffer. “This is something we’ve had several preliminary conversations with the city about, and the city is supposed to do a study this fall to see how feasible it would be.”
The city is waiting until after Labor Day when the special COVID parking accommodations expire, said Soiles, to launch the “the curbside analysis regarding changes to resident parking in the Back Bay.”
The city currently has no plans to undertake curbside studies in any other neighborhoods besides Back Bay at this time, Soiles added.