SALEM — Mayor Kim Driscoll and city business leaders will be at the train station Monday morning collecting signatures for a new parking garage.
The mayor and members of The Salem Partnership, a business lobby, will ask commuters to sign a petition asking the state to build a parking garage at the MBTA station.
The station has 460 surface parking spaces, which fill up early every weekday, forcing commuters to park along Bridge Street or in the downtown. The city wants to replace it with a 1,000-car garage.
The Partnership sent out an e-mail this week asking members to sign up for the early morning petition drive. They plan to solicit signatures from 6 to 8:30 a.m.
"If this state wants people to take public transportation, it needs to invest in new parking garages at commuter rail stops, and it needs to do it in Salem, the busiest (station) in the commonwealth," Patricia Zaido, the Partnership's executive director, said in the e-mail.
The projected cost of a new garage is $30 million. It would have to be financed, the mayor said, through federal, state and private sources.
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