March 4, 2022
Dear Members of the Board of the Alderman and Infrastructure Committee:
My wife and I support outdoor dining in Nashua but are opposed to
continuation of use of jersey barriers and 2-lane only traffic flow on Main
Street, Nashua in order to expand outdoor dining permanently or for any
further, extended period of time. While use of the barriers and limiting traffic
to a 2-lane flow on Main Street in order to accommodate expanded outdoor
dining may have been appropriate for temporary use during the pandemic, it
is no longer the case and should not be continued in 2002 or beyond.
Nashua has considered creating a 2-lane Main Street more than once since we
moved to the City in 1991, and has properly rejected the idea for reasons that
still apply today. I would very much like to see Nashua have a downtown like
those that exist on Manchester or Concord NH. But downtown Nashua is not
like the downtown areas of Manchester or Concord where 2-lane only traffic
patterns have been successfully implemented. Nashua’s geography and it’s
limited river crossings significantly constrains traffic and funnels much of the
City’s north-south traffic onto Main Street. Conversely, Manchester and
Concord’s geographic and roadway layouts permit the diversion of traffic
otherwise headed into their 2-lane downtown areas onto the numerous side
streets that run parallel to Elm Street in Manchester and Main Street in
Concord. Due to the river crossings in Nashua, north-south traffic cannot be
diverted easily or at all onto streets running parallel to Nashua’s Main Street
or cannot be diverted unless traffic first travels over parts of Main Street. Even
if the traffic could be sufficiently diverted away from our City’s Main Street,
Nashua simply does not have side streets adjacent to Main Street with the
capacity to handle significant traffic flow like the side streets that exist and
run parallel to the 2-lane downtowns in Concord and Manchester.
The next issue is parking. The 2-lane downtowns in Concord and Manchester
utilize head-in parking and not parallel parking. It would appear that Nashua’s
proposal utilizes parallel parking only, to the extent any parking whatsoever
on Main Street will be permitted under the Nashua proposal. Parking is
already at a premium in downtown Nashua. Expanding outdoor dining
permanently or for an extended period of time will only make parking in the
downtown area more difficult.
