The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Thrive Juice Bar & Kitchen.
BAR HARBOR—In the middle of the Bar Harbor’s Sustainable Tourism Task Force meeting, August 12, member Jeremy Dougherty shared a harrowing story.
“I had a one way car come down the extension went into my lane right by the bike shop, completely oblivious, coming at me at full speed,” he told other task force members.
It was a near-hit, he said, by the intersection of West Street and Eden Street, just at the beginning of downtown proper. It is an intersection marked in the town’s recently adopted Safe Streets for All plan for a potential roundabout.
“We know all of these areas, and we have this congestion, and more cars is never going to be the answer, which means more parking spots is never going to be the answer,” Dougherty said as the task force discussed what it might suggest for the town about vehicle management and congestion.
He compared the situation to freeways which add on another lane to deal with congestion, but just end up even more congestion and with more cars.
“The larger garage you get, the more stuff you store,” he said, advocating that the task force spend most—if not all—of its time on trying to relieve vehicular congestion.
The goal of the 13-member group is to have a clear vision for Bar Harbor’s tourism future, Bar Harbor Planning Director Michele Gagnon said at the task force’s first meeting in 2025.
“It is about what’s best and wanted by the community as a whole,” she’d said.
The task force is to bring a report to the Bar Harbor Town Council about sustainable tourism. What exactly will go in that report will be determined by the process. Its members were appointed by the Bar Harbor Town Council in April. The town council had approved the task force during its January 21, 2025, meeting.
Those recommendations are starting to come together, but nothing is set yet.
As task force members and consultants and town staff talked about vehicular congestion, and how the community seems to be solidly behind that it’s an issue, they also delved into other work—though not always by name—being done by the town. The 2035 Comprehensive Plan meant to be the guide for the town’s future, the Safe Streets for All Plan, and the proposed land use amendments about graduated lodging scale, which would limit downtown lodgings to 12 guest suites or less, all came up in one way or another.
“If you look at a two-hour radius around our region and what lodging has been added there. It’s so much more than what everybody in this town is worried about in reducing down to 12 rooms for our hotel here. There’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hotel rooms being built within a two hour radius right now,” Dougherty said. “And there’s 148 rooms being built in Portland right now.”
All those visitors, he said, will likely be coming to Bar Harbor.
Bar Harbor has approximately 5,000 residents. That population expands (some say by a multitude of four) in the summer season, mostly propelled by its proximity to Acadia National Park, a major tourist destination that gathers approximately 4 million visits each year.
“You can stop the Bar Harbor growth,” Dougherty said, “but it’s not going to be stopping STRs (short term rentals); it’s not going to stop hotel development. It’s not stopping any of these places.”
There is a 28-site RV campground proposed for a location off the Bayside Road in Ellsworth. A new hotel, operated by Dougherty’s employer, is being built in Ellsworth. Rental cottages in Trenton were just opened. Bar Harbor is the only town on the island that manages short-term rentals and has a cap on those that aren’t primary residences.
“Cars are going to keep coming. The car situation, the traffic, the sidewalks” are going to get worse, he said, as campgrounds and cottages are built out of town while the hotel industry occupation has been the same in town, he said.
“It’s a misguided tension,” he said of the tension between lodging and the community.
It starts and ends with parking.
“I would advocate to remove an enormous amount of parking,” he said and try to replace the lost budget revenue with a local option sales tax, which would have to be approved by the state legislature. The more parking, he reasoned, the more congestion.
The town’s voter-approved comprehensive plan sets the town’s goals, Task Force Chair Vicki Hall reminded those in the room at the start of the meeting. The task force sets the strategy. Then others—most likely the Town Council or its designees—move that strategy forward.
The task force is still setting the strategy and one of the bigger discussions it had during its August 12 meeting was about vehicles in town.
The task force members seemed to agree that the first objective laid out by the consultants—lessening vehicle congestion downtown during the peak tourism season—was a priority.
How exactly to do that was the question.
Could parking prices be increased for visitors? Could parking be done away with in-town and moved to satellite lots. Where could those lots be? Behind the Criterion Theatre? At the Conners Emerson School? The ferry terminal on Route 3? The Edgewood Lot behind the YMCA? All of the options?
How could they motivate people to actually park in places like the Acadia Gateway Center or out of town lots?
Task Force member Chris Cannon suggested an app or sign system telling people heading to the island a real-time number of available parking spaces downtown to help encourage them to hop on the Island Explorer instead.
One of the potential objectives the task force might recommend is to shift where vehicles are in Bar Harbor, especially during the peak season.
“That applies to both vehicles that are moving and that aren’t moving,” said Ben Nussbaumer, one of the consultants from J.E. Austin Associates leading the process.
“I did not like the phrase ‘shift to other areas,’” Task Force member Michael Boland said.
That seemed to him a bit like just shifting the problem away from the waterfront by Ells Pier and to other portions of the town. Boland said that he’d prefer if they discuss it as giving people ways to visit downtown with opportunities to not use their vehicles to do so.
Hall agreed that the biggest issues from the feedback the consultants have gathered and from the workshops focused around the congestion caused by vehicles and the inconveniences related to that. Pushing hotels out of town, she agreed, just pushes more vehicles into town, circulating through its streets.
“We’re never going to stop people from coming here,” Hall said, so the goal needs to be how to minimize the vehicle congestion.
She also worried about Bar Harbor business ownership and property ownership being shoved away from local residents and toward venture capitalists or other directions away from local ownership.
Task Force member Chris Kirk said of the Acadia Gateway Center, the newly opened space for the Island Explorer with parking for visitors in Trenton, “That is so under used.”
Just one person, she said, got on the bus when she visited at 1 p.m. Another group of six girls got into their car.
“It feels like it’s kind of far for Bar Harbor if you’re a family,” she said of leaving a vehicle at the center and then traveling onto the island.
Others agreed and related similar anecdotal experiences.
Cannon suggested raising parking fees in certain times, creating pedestrian zones.
“Park and ride lots do work if you get people to use them,” he said, which requires a culture shift.
Cannon also spoke toward increased accessibility issues downtown for people using wheelchairs. A multi-model transit hub behind the Criterion would be a great long-term solution. Boland added that having police officers walking the streets helping guide pedestrians into sidewalks would be a positive.
“More cars is never going to be the answer, which means more parking spots is never going to be the answer,” Dougherty said.
Katherine Zavestoski agreed. “Vehicles are a scourge.”
Zavestoski said both pedestrian and bike infrastructure getting into town and around town would do well to be improved. She lives in Town Hill and said she’d take advantage of a dedicated space in the village to bring her to downtown Bar Harbor, which she currently avoids driving to particularly around certain high-congestion times.
If the task force could solve the problems of vehicle congestion and housing, Pat Buccello said with a grin, “If we could solve those? They’d erect a statue for us.”
Other members chuckled.
A key aspect, Buccello said, is the partnership with Acadia National Park, getting people off Eagle Lake Road and West Street Extension and into safer spaces for cars, bikes, and people.
“The park has got to be at this table at some point,” she said.
This is the first article in a series about this meeting.
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LINKS TO LEARN MORE
You can email the taskforce: STMTaskForce@barharbormaine.gov.
The Planning Department staff are also included in the group email.
Sustainable Tourism Management Task Force bylaws
The task force’s page on the town’s website.
Comprehensive plan executive summary
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I like the idea of closing a few blocks of some streets in the downtown area. However, it would be tricky for the people who have to work there.
A roundabout for West/Eden would be fantastic. People would complain but hey, it's New England! So shocking! The fact is that they're much safer.