Jim Thorpe Borough Council voted Thursday night to move forward with several parking and traffic changes including lifting a restriction that prohibited larger vehicles to travel around Hazard Square.

The change is being made to accommodate a recent change in traffic pattern that prohibits left turns from Route 209 into the county parking lot on weekends.

Borough officials said all traffic coming from the Nesquehoning side of Route 209 is now being routed around Hazard Square and back onto Route 209 so it can make a right turn into the lot.

“It really has been helping with traffic flow downtown,” Police Chief Joe Schatz said. “It’s one of the best moves we could have made because the vehicles waiting to turn left into the lot were creating a logjam during the busy periods.”

The large vehicle restriction at Hazard Square was lifted in part to accommodate buses that drop off or pick up at the county lot, such as those used by rafting companies, and the Jim Thorpe Trolley Company trolleys.

One of the parking measures approved Thursday night called for the last spot on the left side of Hazard Square, going around the curve between Molly Maguire’s Irish Pub and the Carbon County Courthouse, to be designated “no parking.”

“One of the things we realized with larger traffic going through Hazard Square now is that it’s challenging getting through that corner if the vehicle parked in that last spot is too far away from the curb,” Councilman Michael Rivkin said.

Council also authorized an ordinance change that officially permits angled parking in the borough.

The borough recently undertook a project to redraw parking spaces downtown. The new parking lines, according to Councilman Robert Schaninger, who spearheaded the plans, give the borough around 15 extra spaces downtown.

An ordinance passed in November to limit parking in the first block of Broadway to compact and subcompact vehicles is being scaled back.

“With the new angled spaces, we’re now only looking to limit the compact/subcompact spaces to those five or six spots in front of the Inn of Jim Thorpe,” Schatz said.

One change discussed but not made Thursday was designating Packer Hill Avenue “one way.”

Council debated making the road one way up the hill from Hazard Square or keeping two way traffic to the upper county parking lot at the Courthouse Annex limiting vehicles to one way up the hill from there.

“If it were up to me, I would make it one way all the way up the hill because your goal would be to get rid of that bottleneck down at Hazard Square and Route 209,” Schatz said. “You have that crosswalk down there now and it’s just a really busy area. Plus we’ve gotten complaints that vehicles continue to shoot right down there and don’t stop at the stop sign.”

One hiccup in the plan is that vehicles in the first block of Center Avenue can only park on the side of the street that faces down Packer Hill Avenue, meaning they would have to constantly turn around in order to comply with the one-way designation.

“We’ll take this back to committee and take a look at some of these issues and see what we can come up with,” Council President Greg Strubinger said.