Downtown Chapel Hill parking will be a little cheaper in July as the town begins a new free parking program.

There will be free two-hour meter parking on the streets of downtown Chapel Hill every Saturday in July.

Chapel Hill Police Chief Chris Blue said he hopes that this program will be a great way to help bring attention to the downtown area this summer.

“We heard from our merchants downtown that the summertime, as things slow down in Chapel Hill, this might be a nice way to stimulate activity and get a little attention. And we thought that was a neat idea.”

Since this program only applies to Saturdays in July, Chapel Hill’s Parking Superintendent, Brenda Jones said there are other affordable ways for businesses to bring customers downtown.

“We have ticket booklets where you have 100 hours worth of parking for $75; you can give those to your customers. We have token programs – the more that you purchase, the less it costs you so it’s based on volume,” Jones said. “We have validation programs where you create a validation stamp, you share it with us and we approve it so you can stamp those for your customers. We also have a mobile parking app that’s called Park Mobile, so merchants are actually able to set up their own accounts where they can give their customers a code, punch that in and they can pay for their own customers.”

Chapel Hill wants more visitors to enjoy their experience downtown without worrying about parking tickets. Blue reminds visitors of the courtesy-ticket program for first time violators.

“We also recognize that, particularly, visitors to a community – and we have many visitors who come here for a variety of reasons – they may not always understand your parking rules or they may have missed a sign or so on, so we do have a courtesy-ticket program for first-time violators,” Blue said. “We’ve issued over 26,000 courtesy tickets, which tells you that we support that notion that you can make a mistake, we’ve all made them. We don’t want you to have a bad feeling about Chapel Hill and certainly not as a result of a parking experience.”

This Saturday will be the first day visitors can take advantage of the free parking. A similar parking program goes on during the month of December as holiday shopping begins.

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