City of Duluth to Offer Parking Alternatives During Snow Emergencies

DULUTH, Minn.- Although the Northland has only experienced hit or miss light snow showers, the city of Duluth is getting prepared for its very first snow emergency enforcement by creating parking alternatives for residents with their parking pilot lot program.

Two thousand three hundred snow emergency signs were installed across Duluth earlier this year. So when it begins snowing hard, the snow emergency streets need to be cleared of cars for plowing.

The City of Duluth offers a solution for residents to move their vehicles from the snow emergency streets to one of the seven designated parking lots across town.

“We realized that a lot of the folks on those routes are going to have some challenge in finding someplace to park, and so the city created this amnesty lot program to kind of take up the slack and give folks another option for a place to park,” said Duluth Parking Services Manager Mark Bauer.

In the case of a snow emergency, residents signed up for Northland Alert will be given notifications at 4 p.m. that day to move their cars.

They will be able to park their vehicles in the snow emergency parking lots until 8 p.m. the next day.

Officials encourage people to use the buddy system or public transportation after moving their cars to the parking lots.

“For folks who may have limited access or other barriers to park during a snow emergency and still need to move their vehicle completely off the street to make way for efficient and timely plow operations,” said Duluth Community Relations Officer Alicia Kozlowski. “And so we have a number of those lots here in Canal Park as well as across the city.”

Each resident of Duluth will be receiving a brochure in the mail, displaying a snow emergency calendar and QR code with more information. The QR code will take you to the city’s website, where you can find a map of the designated parking lots.