When Maxwell’s still hosted live music, the nightclub was a nucleus of Hoboken’s punk rock iconoclasm and small town bravado. When it closed in 2013, Maxwell’s became a symbol of a different sort – a casualty of the city’s resident-first parking mindset.
A month before closing, owner Todd Abramson said in The Hoboken Reporter that the confusing signage and limited visitor parking hours had hampered his business and helped to trigger his decision to throw in the towel.
While some in the business community doubt that parking alone was enough to push Abramson out, his remarks were a rare example of a prominent Hoboken businessman saying what many business owners felt – that the city’s heavy parking enforcement was not designed with them in mind.
Now that Arup, the planning firm hired by the city of Hoboken to tackle Hoboken’s parking issues, has presented its draft plan for overhauling the city’s parking rules, The Hoboken Reporter spoke to five business representatives to hear their hopes and concerns regarding the city’s plans.
Currently, most streets in Hoboken have a side dedicated to resident-only parking, and one side available that allows people to park for up to four hours without a permit, or with a visitor’s permit. In the business district, often both sides are available for any permit holders. Certain blocks have meters, and the town also runs municipal garages.
Working with the Chamber
Greg Dell’Aquila, the president of the Hoboken Chamber of Commerce, cautioned that the overall impact of any new parking master plan will not be known until years into implementation. He said there will likely be a negative impact to some businesses in the short run, but credited the city for seeking to incorporate the concerns of businesspeople.
As the main organization representing businesses in Hoboken, the Chamber of Commerce and some of its members have been able to meet with the Zimmer administration and Arup to discuss parking. However, the diversity of parking needs expressed by business owners in Hoboken made it hard for Dell’Aquila to compile a list of requests.
Dell’Aquila likened the parking reform process to his experience developing properties like the Hoboken Business Center.
“They hate you during construction,” he said, “but once it’s done, they compliment you on the building.”
Pinching business permits
Mike Novak says there seems to be a change to the parking rules in Hoboken every few years, and it always seems to get worse for businesses.
Unlike many office workers in Hoboken, the employees at Atlantic Environmental Solutions (AES), where Novak serves as president, need to use their cars. Every day, representatives of the environmental consulting firm located in downtown Hoboken drive around the region and state to visit properties in need of remediation.
Novak said his employees who don’t live in the city have business permits and can generally find spots, though not without some difficulty. He said he was concerned about the portion of the Arup draft plan that calls for forbidding the use of business permits south of Sixth Street or east of Willow Avenue, which would directly hurt his employees.
In general, Novak said the city should redo its entire parking concept to heavily encourage residents and employees alike to park in garages, freeing up street spaces for peripatetic visitors and guests. If the city metered every on-street space in Hoboken and limited how long residents’ cars could stay put, he said, it would solve the on-street demand problem in one day.
Novak said he understood that catering to resident demands for on-street parking made good political sense because visitors and commuter employees can’t vote in municipal elections, but said that most of the business owners in Hoboken were voting residents too.
Loading zones
A representative from one of Hoboken’s major corporate tenants, who requested that his company not be identified for the article, said his employees had no problem parking in the city. The main issue he saw was the lack of places where vendors and repairmen can safely and legally park around his company’s offices.
According to the tenant, several of these temporary parkers come every day to deliver food, fix pipes, or shred paper, and some have trucks too tall to fit into the building’s garage.
The draft Parking Master Plan does call for the creation of loading zones, but they are limited to Washington Street and its side streets. It is unclear whether Arup or the city intends to include such a design near the corporate office buildings on River Street.
Even on Washington Street, though, business owners are concerned about how loading zones will work. Eugene Flinn owns three restaurants on Hoboken’s main drag, including Amanda’s and Elysian Café.
In Flinn’s ideal scenario, the four parking spaces closest to bus stops on Washington Street would be converted to loading zones for two hours after daily street cleaning from 8 to 9 a.m.
Flinn said businesses should have to get a special and expensive vendor permit to use these loading spaces, to make up the revenue lost by monopolizing such prime spaces for hours at a time.
Reducing cars on campus
As Hoboken’s only institution of higher learning, Stevens Institute of Technology has unique demands when it comes to parking. The school brings 250 faculty plus additional employees to campus every day, and must cater to the transportation needs of its almost 2,700 students.
Robert Maffia, Stevens’ vice president of facilities and campus operations, said the school has undertaken its own initiatives to reduce the amount of cars, including additional bike racks on campus and a growing shuttle service that links Stevens and its off-campus student residences to Hoboken’s public transit hub. The school also bans freshmen from having cars on campus.
According to Maffia, the school’s initiatives have had a noticeable effect. “Most students who live off-campus do not have cars and use shuttles, bikes, and skateboards to get around,” he said, Still, Maffia admitted that “if everyone were given the option to drive to campus, most would.”
The Institute continues to provide its own private parking spaces, and for a long time has been working to complete a new garage that will help to provide parking for its growing community.
A seat at the table
While businesspeople expressed a range of concerns and kudos about the draft parking plan, they were unanimous in being thankful for the opportunities they had been given to provide input. The city and Arup held a number of stakeholder meetings and conference calls that included members of the Chamber of Commerce.
In addition, individual businesspeople said they had met with John Morgan, the city’s director of transportation and parking.
Many of the businesspeople said the draft parking plan and the process in general were a promising sign that the city was finally taking its parking problems seriously.
Flinn said he hopes this focus will translate into serious reinvestment in the city’s parking infrastructure. He said the revenue from meters, permits, and tickets in the city should be reinvested into increasing and improving the parking system rather than filling out municipal budgets.
“The Hoboken Parking Utility was put in place to solve problems,” he said.
Still, Flinn emphasized that he thinks the city is working in earnest to make parking work.
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.