YACK on:
Parking garage
Grant Sanders
What amazes me about my 17- year experience with this island is that the people here constantly fall all over each other in tear-filled convulsions

complaining about the utter tragedy of how the island has changed, and yet, when the opportunity arises to say "no" to change, we often throw our arms around change and give it a great big bear hug. Take the parking garage proposed for the empty lot owned by National Grid downtown as an example. I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who think this is a great idea.

Folks, come on. Building a multimillion dollar, multi-level parking garage on an island that has no parking problem ten months out of the year, on land leased to the town by an off-island corporation is an even stupider use of open space than that game in which grown men and women dressed in the dorkiest clothes possible, spend hours swinging metal and wooden clubs trying to put a little white ball into a small, round hole in the ground.

Yeah, let's give National Grid wheelbarrows full of cash to be carted off the island, never to be seen again. It's not like they're not sticking it to us already by forcing us all to pay for a second electric cable that none of us would need if a few ack-titled® people would crack a window instead of cranking the AC. Let's channel every car heading to the downtown area onto Orange, then Union, then Washington Street during the summer to create a painful and mind-numbing gridlock just south of Main Street when there are more than enough parking spaces to be had if people would be willing to park ten minutes away from their destination. Let's warehouse cars on an island that builds 200+ more houses each year, creating the need for 2+ additional vehicles per home, even though the vast majority of people who live here have asked the town to limit vehicles, not make them feel pampered and special. Let's continue to turn a blind eye to municipal employees or the employees of downtown merchants who bring their vehicles to the core district every day, and who then, instead of being as productive as they can be, which is presumably why they receive excellent wages and benefits, leave their place of business every hour or two to wipe the chalk marks off their tires and move their car to another space in an effort to avoid parking tickets they'll probably never pay anyway.

Do the math. One town employee moving his or her car six times a day at 10 minutes per move is wasting an hour of time a day, five hours a week, 20 hours a month, 240 hours a year. In the ad business, where we live and die by time sheets, if I had an employee boinking the pooch to the tune of 240 hours per year, they'd be fired so fast their cardboard file box full of office tchotchkes would likely burst into flame due to friction with the earth's atmosphere on its way out the door.

And that's not even addressing the fact that these people are taking up spots that would otherwise be used by consumers who spend money. You remember money? The stuff that lubricates the local economy? The paper and coin that pays property taxes and sales taxes and room occupancy taxes? The material that allows us year-round residents to be able to actually live here instead of someplace less nice, less community-minded, less interesting and less calm and quiet?

I don't know about you, but if I wanted more cars and parking garages in my life, I would move to some place like Boston or Providence or Portsmouth. I'm not one of those people who walks down to the new roundabout at Sparks Ave and Pleasant Street and inhales deeply of exhaust fumes extolling the virtues of being able to move more cars more quickly. I think fewer cars moving at a snails pace is more in keeping with what Nantucket is all about. Ask any tourist if they come to Nantucket to commune with cars and off-island solutions to seasonal traffic snafus, or whether it's the ginger ice cream at the Juice Bar, the history of the island or the sunsets from Eel Point that keeps them coming back. I've got my money on the ice cream and the pretty colors. But what do I know? I'm so darned negative. Such a complainer. Such a fly in the oh-so-lustrous ointment of progress and growth.

Well, somebody's got to be. Otherwise we might wake up in a few years having built a giant parking garage that will sit empty from September through May on one of the last large parcels of open land near our vital and vibrant waterfront, and there will be nobody around to say, "See, I told you that was a stupid idea!"

YACK on. I

Grant Sanders is the host of YACK, The Nantucket Online Community at yackon.com and he has a knack for finding parking spaces, the secret of which he will share in a future column. His views are his alone, and do not reflect the editorial stance of The Nantucket Independent. Or his wife.