Shoppers can now park free of charge for two hours at Boston’s parking meters every Saturday until the end of the year.
The City of Boston began offering free two-hour parking this Saturday, dubbed Small Business Saturday in the United States, and will continue doing so until Dec. 26, according to a City press release.
The initiative will help small businesses that were hit hard during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the press release.
“We are doing more than ever to help our small businesses get through a very difficult time,” Mayor Marty Walsh said in the press release. “Our small businesses contribute so much to our local economy, and I encourage everyone to shop safely and shop local this year.”
The City has issued more than $9.6 million in grants to about 3,400 Boston small businesses as of Wednesday.
Natalia Urtubey, small business director at the City’s Department of Economic Development, said offering this free parking is another way of supporting small businesses by encouraging drivers to shop local and venture into neighborhoods with shopping districts.
“Offering two hours of free parking is a great way to bring folks into the neighborhoods to shop at their favorite retail stores,” Urtubey said, “to check out the restaurants that are open for takeout and delivery, and be able to just really take advantage of being in the neighborhood.”
She added that the City has coordinated with local businesses since the onset of the pandemic by surveying them about their needs. Responses were then used to draft a relief policy targeting problems specific to small businesses.
“We were hearing from businesses that they could not take on more debt, so loans would not be helpful,” Urtubey said. “The only thing that could really be helpful were grants, and so we were able to model our first relief fund that came out in April directly based off of what we were hearing from businesses.”
Especially after the holidays, Urtubey said, winter is always a tough time for small businesses.
“There’s some level of that being amplified dramatically with COVID,” Urtubey said, “so we want to make sure businesses know that our office is available and open to help them at any point in time.”
Sixty-four percent of Massachusetts small businesses reported gross revenue drops of 25 percent or more for the first half of 2020, according to data from the MassINC Polling Group.
Formulating fiscal policy responses during the pandemic is uniquely challenging, said Mark Hooker, a visiting economics lecturer at Northeastern University.
“It is a really unusual recession,” Hooker said. “It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”
He added that demand for many businesses and services is unlikely to return to normal until the virus is under control.
“The main thing that you want to try to do as a policymaker between now and then, and hopefully that’s only, let’s say, three or four months away, is keep these businesses afloat one way or another,” Hooker said.
The cost of parking is a relatively small factor in decreased demand as customers try to avoid COVID-19, Hooker said. A number of other factors, including more people purchasing items from large online retailers, threaten local shops more severely.
“Everybody’s ordering from Amazon, which hurts local businesses,” Hooker said. “So, if giving people free parking or improving public transportation even a little bit helps move things [to local stores] from online, I think that’s a plus.”
