Anyone planning to shop in downtown DeKalb during the holiday season – or any other time of the year – may be better off walking or taking the bus to get there, some downtown merchants said.

While there are spaces on Lincoln Highway directly in front of the shops, they are full most of the time.

There are public lots located behind most of the buildings.

Megan Morrison, owner of Megan Morrison Home and Garden, 237 E. Lincoln Highway, said it’s difficult for non-residents to know where the lots are.

“The city needs to put up more signage to make people aware of the lots,” she said. “People complain all the time, but I don’t know if it is really justified or not.”

Morrison said she thinks that because people are used to large parking lots that major retail stores have, they encounter problems when faced with the sparse and spread-out parking in the downtown area.

Parking has worsened over the past few years because of an increase in students at NIU and the number of parents who come to visit them, said Kenny Weinstock, owner of Out on a Whim, a body piercing parlor and gift shop at 127 E. Lincoln Highway.

Some people wish the diagonal parking spots, available in the downtown area before the current parallel parking spots replaced them, would return, Morrison said.

If people were allowed to park diagonally, more spaces would be available to the public directly in front of the shops.

“In order to do that, they would have to tear up the sidewalk and the construction would be bad for business,” Weinstock said.

Parking has gotten so bad that occasionally merchants have had to find alternative parking.

“Some owners and employees of downtown businesses had to ask permission to park over in the Walgreens parking lot (100 W. Lincoln Highway) because there is so little space to park,” Weinstock said.

Also, Weinstock said, parking has been even worse since the city lowered the parking fines last month from $10 to $3.

“It will only continue to get worse unless the city does something to fix the problem,” Weinstock said.