Burton Spruce Balkind
Lines of traffic on Nantucket on June 17, weeks before the true summer rush. If this is the shoulder season, the high season will test just how much more the island’s roads can absorb.
Nantucket has a car problem, and this summer, one closed parking lot may make it impossible to ignore
Don Costanzo • June 23, 2026
The closure of a downtown valet lot is exposing a larger question for Nantucket: not just where vehicles should park, but how many belong here at all.
The closure of Nantucket’s downtown valet parking lot this summer may appear minor at first glance. It’s one lot on Candle Street, temporarily unavailable while the historic National Grid property at 5 Candle Street undergoes renovations. But the disappearance of the lot is exposing a much larger issue that has been building for years.
The valet lot was not simply overflow parking for tourists, it functioned as one of the few pressure-release valves in an already strained downtown transportation system. Restaurant workers, retail employees, contractors, commuters, seasonal staff, and long-term parkers relied on it because downtown Nantucket has very little room left for error during the summer months.
In 2025, the lot handled 7,322 vehicles during the season, according to figures reported by town officials. More than 100 cars a day regularly used the service during peak summer weeks, with the busiest day on July 5, when 135 vehicles passed through the lot. This summer, all of those cars will have to go somewhere else.
Town transportation manager Mike Burns acknowledged the problem directly, telling the Inquirer & Mirror that there is no replacement lot lined up and encouraging people to rely more heavily on carpooling, public transportation, rideshares, taxis, and other alternatives that “do not stress the parking supply.”
The statement reflects a reality Nantucket has been moving toward for years. The island is no longer simply dealing with a parking shortage, it is confronting the limits of a transportation system built around narrow streets, seasonal population surges, rising service demands, and growing vehicle volume without a clear consensus on how much traffic the island can realistically sustain.
It’s also forcing a more uncomfortable question. Maybe Nantucket does not only have too many cars, maybe too many of the cars are simply too big?
Two oversized vehicles on Nantucket: a Tesla Cybertruck available as a rental through the Turo app, and a large off-road SUV parked on the island’s cobblestones. As Nantucket debates traffic, parking, and alternative transportation, scenes like these point to a growing question: the island may not only have too many vehicles in summer, but too many vehicles built for roads far larger than its own.
A Downtown Built for Another Era
Downtown Nantucket was not designed around modern traffic volumes. The core street network predates automobiles entirely, with narrow roads, limited curb space, minimal loading areas, and dense pedestrian activity concentrated in town, around the harbor, and near the ferry terminals.
Nantucket’s streets were laid out for people, carts, horses, walking, hauling, and harbor commerce, not for SUVs, delivery trucks, ride-hail loops, contractor vans, landscape trailers, and vacation vehicles all competing for the same tight geometry.
During much of the year, the system functions adequately. But in July and August, the pressure intensifies dramatically. Ferries unload passengers and vehicles. Delivery trucks circulate continuously. Contractors move between job sites. Rideshare drivers loop through downtown. Thousands of seasonal workers try to access businesses concentrated within a relatively small area.
The town’s parking inventory is modest relative to the demand placed on it during peak season. Burns stated last year that downtown currently contains approximately 330 one-hour parking spaces and 750 two-hour spaces, in addition to the Washington Street municipal lot, which provides around 150 spaces.
Those numbers help explain why the loss of 100 or more valet spaces on a peak day matters. In a system with little slack, a single removed lot doesn’t just eliminate parking, it changes circulation patterns. Vehicles that once disappeared into a managed valet operation now have to circle, search, wait, idle, or settle into nearby neighborhoods.
The pressure is not coming from a single source, and that’s what makes the problem so difficult. Nearly every vehicle on the road has a legitimate reason to be there. The issue is not one group misbehaving, it’s a system that has outgrown the space available to it.
Steamship Authority
Vehicles queue for the ferry to Nantucket, while others are packed into the vessel for the trip across Nantucket Sound. The ferry is the island’s front door for cars, trucks, and SUVs — but once those vehicles roll off the boat, Nantucket’s narrow roads, limited parking, and downtown bottlenecks are left to absorb them.
The Ferry as the Front Door
What makes Nantucket different from many mainland resort towns is that vehicle volume is physically imported. Cars don’t gradually disperse across a regional road network. They arrive by boat.
Once a vehicle comes off the ferry, it does not disappear after lunch, a beach day, or a shopping trip. It remains on the island for days or weeks at a time, parked at rental properties, hotels, side streets, beaches, job sites, and downtown spaces while continuing to circulate through the island each day.
Steamship Authority figures illustrate the scale. More than 83,000 passenger vehicles under 20 feet traveled to Nantucket in 2025, along with roughly 36,000 larger commercial and freight vehicles. Those numbers do not include every local vehicle already on-island, nor do they capture how many cars are stored, borrowed, rented, or shifted between seasonal properties once summer begins.
Nantucket does not directly limit the number of ordinary passenger vehicles arriving on the island each season. Instead, it manages congestion after the vehicles arrive through timed parking, enforcement, residential permits, commuter lots, shuttles, taxis, bike paths, and informal workarounds.
The ferry system controls access, but the town largely absorbs the consequences. A private passenger vehicle may be only 16, 17, or 18 feet long on paper. But once it arrives, it requires road space, parking space, turning space, curb access, and enforcement capacity. Multiply that by tens of thousands of seasonal arrivals, and the issue becomes less about a single lot or a single bad traffic weekend and more about the island’s practical carrying capacity.
Town of Nantucket
A Nantucket parking ticket and a one-hour downtown parking sign capture the enforcement side of the island’s summer squeeze. With limited curb space, residential permit zones, and time-restricted downtown parking, the town can manage turnover — but enforcement does not create more room. It only decides who gets to occupy the space, and for how long.
The Parking Economy
Part of Nantucket’s transportation system operates informally, through arrangements and workarounds that many island residents understand but rarely discuss publicly.
Workers move their vehicles every few hours to avoid tickets. Seasonal employees rely on side streets or private parking arrangements. Contractors stagger schedules around available spaces. Some commuters leave vehicles in peripheral lots and walk or bike into town. Others depend on employers to help secure parking somewhere outside the downtown core.
The town’s residential parking permit system intensifies the pressure during summer months. Between June 1 and September 30, many residential-commercial districts impose two-hour parking limits for non-permitted vehicles. Residents can purchase permits, but workers without permits often face limited legal options for long-term parking near downtown employment centers.
Enforcement has also increased over time. Overtime parking tickets on Nantucket are significantly more expensive than in many mainland communities, and the town has tightened rules governing oversized vehicles, overnight commercial parking, and long-term storage in municipal lots.
Last year, officials implemented additional restrictions at the Fairgrounds commuter lot, limiting stays to 96 hours while prohibiting larger vehicles beyond certain weight and size thresholds. The changes reflected concerns that overflow parking areas were increasingly functioning as long-term vehicle storage rather than commuter relief. But enforcement alone does not create additional capacity. It simply redistributes the pressure into other parts of the system.
That is the recurring pattern. A rule is tightened in one place, parking demand moves somewhere else. A lot closes, vehicles scatter into nearby streets. A downtown space turns over more quickly, workers lose another place to park. A commuter lot fills, neighborhoods feel the spillover. Nantucket keeps managing symptoms because the underlying geometry has not changed.
Bimmer Life/Jack + Charlie's/Doug Demuro
Smaller vehicles offer one possible answer to Nantucket’s space problem. A Mini Cooper, a compact island runabout, and a low-speed open-air vehicle each take up far less room than the oversized SUVs and trucks now common on island roads. If Nantucket cannot create more street or parking space, one question is whether it should start rewarding vehicles that use less of both.
Smaller Vehicles, Bigger Question
That’s why the emerging discussion around alternative transportation is important. According to recent community discussion, town officials and local leaders have been looking at a broader set of options, including clearer rules for e-bikes, possible use of low-speed vehicles or golf-cart-style transportation in limited areas, and incentives for smaller cars.
Select Board member Matt Fee has also been described as working on alternative transportation ideas for the island. The smaller-car idea may sound minor, but it goes directly to the heart of the issue. Nantucket’s streets and parking spaces are not expanding. The average American vehicle, meanwhile, has grown larger over time. Full-size SUVs, pickup trucks, large crossovers, and contractor vehicles occupy more physical space than the compact cars that once made up a greater share of island traffic.
A parking system designed around one vehicle per space begins to break down when the vehicles themselves become larger. A big SUV does not merely take up a marked space. It can reduce visibility, narrow an already tight travel lane, make turning movements harder, crowd sidewalks and bike lanes, and make older streets feel even smaller than they are.
For a dense island downtown, the question is not just fuel efficiency. A Prius may be efficient, but it is still a full-size passenger vehicle for parking purposes. A true microcar, neighborhood electric vehicle, small island utility vehicle, moped, bicycle, cargo bike, or properly regulated e-bike occupies a different amount of space. That difference is not symbolic, it’s capacity.
If Nantucket cannot easily create more road or parking space, it can still change what kind of vehicles receive priority within that space. That could mean designated compact-only parking areas, premium parking for true microcars, restrictions on oversized non-commercial vehicles in certain zones, more remote parking linked to shuttle service, or incentives for workers and employers who shift trips away from full-size vehicles.
The island has long treated parking spaces as if every vehicle is functionally the same, but they’re not.
Stephen Gassman/Allie Leichter/Rozel
E-bikes are becoming part of Nantucket’s transportation future, offering a smaller, faster alternative to cars for workers, residents, and visitors. But their rise also brings a new challenge: deciding which electric bikes belong on shared paths, which belong on roads, and how to make room for them without creating another kind of summer congestion.
E-Bikes, Paths, and the 20 MPH Line
E-bikes have become one of the clearest examples of both the promise and the risk of alternative transportation.
On one hand, e-bikes can remove cars from the road. They can help workers commute longer distances without arriving exhausted. They can make cycling more accessible to older riders, seasonal employees, and people who live outside the downtown core. For an island with limited road space, they offer a much smaller transportation footprint than cars.
On the other hand, faster electric bikes, scooters, and e-motos have created real safety concerns on bike paths and shared-use routes. The difference between a pedal-assist bicycle traveling at a moderate speed and a high-powered electric vehicle moving like a small motorcycle is not subtle, especially on paths shared by children, tourists, walkers, traditional cyclists, and families.
Massachusetts law has been catching up to that reality. Under current state guidance, an electric bicycle is generally defined as having a motor of up to 750 watts and a top speed of 20 mph. In May 2026, Governor Maura Healey filed broader micromobility legislation intended to create clearer rules for e-bikes, scooters, mopeds, and similar devices. Nantucket has already been part of that conversation.
Local discussion has centered on a simple dividing line: lower-speed e-bikes can use bike paths, while faster devices should be treated more like road vehicles. The basic idea is that an e-bike under 20 mph belongs in the bicycle network, while higher-speed machines should not be mixing with walkers and casual path users.
That approach makes sense because it focuses less on labels and more on behavior. The question is not whether something is marketed as an e-bike, it is how fast it goes, how powerful it is, where it operates, and whether the rider understands the rules of the road.
Etiquette matters too. An island-wide shift toward e-bikes will only work if riders slow down around pedestrians, announce passes, use lights, respect intersections, and treat shared paths as shared public space, not private speed lanes. Done well, e-bikes could be part of the solution. Done poorly, they become another form of congestion, only faster and harder to regulate
Golf Carts, Low-Speed Vehicles, and the Island Model
The discussion around golf carts or low-speed vehicles is more complicated. In many resort communities, golf carts or neighborhood electric vehicles have become a middle ground between cars and bikes. They are smaller, slower, easier to park, and better suited for short trips. In the right environment, they can reduce reliance on full-size vehicles.
But Nantucket is not a gated resort community with wide private roads. It’s a historic town with narrow public streets, heavy pedestrian activity, delivery needs, emergency access concerns, and a state regulatory environment that may limit what can operate legally on public ways.
That doesn’t mean the idea should be dismissed; it means it has to be carefully designed. A limited low-speed vehicle program might make sense in specific areas, for specific users, under specific rules. It could be useful for town operations, hotel shuttles, harbor-area circulation, downtown errands, or short-distance mobility for people who cannot easily bike or walk. But it would need clear standards for speed, lighting, safety equipment, parking, insurance, access, and enforcement.
Otherwise, golf carts could become what every other transportation workaround becomes on Nantucket: a sensible idea that creates a new category of conflict because the island did not decide where it belongs. The larger point is that Nantucket is beginning to think beyond the binary choice of cars or no cars. That’s where the conversation needs to go.
The future may not be car-free, but it may need to be car-lighter, smaller, slower, and more deliberate.
Two island models, two very different choices. At left, Bermuda manages congestion through strict vehicle limits and a transportation system built around smaller-scale mobility. At right, Mackinac Island has gone much further, keeping most motor vehicles off its streets altogether and relying on bicycles, walking, horses, and limited service exceptions. Neither model translates perfectly to Nantucket, but both show how islands eventually have to decide how much traffic their geography can realistically absorb.
What Other Islands Have Done
Nantucket is not the first island to face this problem. Other islands have made far more aggressive choices.
Mackinac Island in Michigan has banned most automobiles for more than a century, relying on bicycles, horses, walking, and limited emergency and service exceptions. The ban began in the early automobile era and eventually became part of the island’s identity. Mackinac is not a perfect comparison to Nantucket. Its economy, climate, scale, and logistics are different, but it demonstrates that vehicle restrictions, once seen as extreme, can become a defining feature rather than a liability.
Hydra, Greece, is another famous example. Cars and motorcycles are largely absent from the island, with transportation handled by walking, donkeys, water taxis, and limited municipal vehicles. That model depends on a very different physical and cultural setting, but it reflects the same principle: island character and unrestricted motor vehicle access are often in tension.
Bermuda offers a more regulatory model. For decades, it has limited car ownership and pushed visitors toward scooters, taxis, buses, ferries, and, more recently, small electric rental vehicles. The policy is not simply nostalgic, it’s an acknowledgment that a small island cannot absorb unlimited private cars without damaging the very experience people come for.
Greek islands and cities also offer a more punitive lesson. In parts of Greece, including Crete, illegal parking enforcement can include removal of license plates in serious cases, especially where vehicles obstruct traffic or violate restricted zones. That kind of enforcement would be politically explosive on Nantucket, but it shows how other crowded places treat parking not as a casual inconvenience, but as a public order issue.
Nantucket does not need to copy any of these places wholesale. It cannot. The island has its own economy, year-round community, dependence on trades and service vehicles, and its own legal limits. But the comparison is useful because it broadens the imagination. Other islands have recognized that geography eventually forces choices. Nantucket is clearly approaching that point.
The town has only recently begun collecting permanent traffic-counter data through six monitoring stations installed in 2024. Those counters track vehicle volume, speed, and classifications continuously, giving officials a more detailed picture of how traffic patterns change throughout the year.
That data will matter as it can help distinguish perception from reality. It can show when and where vehicle counts spike, how much traffic is local versus seasonal, how speeds change, and whether specific interventions are actually working. But the broader reality is already familiar to most people who spend time downtown during July and August. The system is operating near its practical limits for much of the summer season.
Burton Spruce Balkind
Traffic on Main Street, left, and Old South Road, right, during the past week. Nantucket’s summer congestion is no longer just a downtown problem; as vehicles move between the ferry, neighborhoods, job sites, beaches, and commercial corridors, the squeeze spreads across the island’s main arteries.
The Limits of the Status Quo
The debate over parking on Nantucket has long moved in circles. Paid parking, remote lots, expanded shuttle service, employee permits, resident protections, stricter enforcement, bike improvements, and vehicle restrictions all return to the table regularly.
Each idea has merit, and each also creates opposition. Paid parking raises concerns about fairness and access. Remote lots only work if the shuttle service is frequent, reliable, and convenient. Vehicle restrictions raise questions about workers, residents, families, tradespeople, and accessibility. E-bikes improve mobility but create safety issues. Golf carts sound charming until they are blocking a lane or mixing with delivery trucks. Compact-car incentives sound simple until the town has to define what actually counts as compact.
That’s why the conversation cannot be reduced to one fix. Nantucket does not have a parking problem in isolation. It has a vehicle volume and size problem, a worker-access problem, a delivery problem, a ferry-arrival problem, and a downtown geometry problem all layered on top of each other.
The closure of the Candle Street valet lot this summer is a stress test for that larger system. It highlights the island’s precarious reliance on private inventory to solve a public capacity problem. It also shows how little margin remains. The answer is not simply to find another lot, it is to decide what kind of transportation system Nantucket wants to reward.
Full-size private vehicles cannot remain the default solution for every trip, every worker, every visitor, and every errand. The island does not have the room. More importantly, Nantucket's historic form was never built around that assumption. A more durable approach would combine several strategies at once: better remote parking, more frequent shuttles, safer bike and e-bike rules, strict limits on high-speed electric devices on paths, incentives for true small vehicles, more employer-based transportation plans, smarter loading zones, stronger ferry-arrival management, and a serious discussion about whether all passenger vehicles should be treated equally during peak season. That last point may be the hardest.
For years, Nantucket has tried to manage congestion after vehicles arrive. The next phase may require managing which vehicles are encouraged to arrive in the first place. Nantucket is not running out of pavement because of one closed valet lot, it’s running into the limits of a transportation model built around full-size vehicles on an island whose streets belong to another century.
The summer traffic and parking squeeze is not a temporary inconvenience, it is another warning.