Dear Editor:
We all know that Washington Street is a war zone in its current condition. Yes, it needs to be repaved, but it is not going to be repaved for at least 18 months according to one of the men I spoke to who was digging up Washington Street as part of PSE&G’s current citywide project to replace the existing metal gas lines with plastic piping.
If you don’t know it by now, the City of Hoboken hired The RBA Group, a consulting firm, to redesign Washington Street. Three public meetings were held in December of 2013 and in May and September of 2014. Now I know that all the citizens of our fair city did not show up at these meetings since I did and saw just how many people were present. The last meeting was rather sparsely attended for the final unveiling of the design team’s efforts based upon their own ideas and some input they got from a survey. So, if you don’t know what the RBA Group recommends for Washington Street, you might check out their documents on-line on the city’s website. It is important that you do look since their initial plan is estimated to cost $14 million and many of their ideas for changing our very busy, car-crowded and pedestrian utilized main street are questionable and potentially harmful.
Washington Street is in deplorable condition. I have been reading projections of another horrible winter approaching, and our city insists upon using salt to melt snow on its streets, a very un-green thing to do. All that salt eventually ends up in the underground waterways and rivers of our state. Using more salt will only go deep into the existing cracks and cause the fissures to widen and then crumble and will result in more potholes. I suggest this winter that the city do more shoveling and plowing and use sand instead of salt to make the streets navigable.
With that said, any redesign of Washington Street should take into account that we have a real winter in our city and that we are not San Diego where the weather permits year round riding of bicycles. Putting a bicycle track of two side by side lanes and not a single lane that blends along with the car traffic, will indeed cause problems with mobility and safety for drivers since the bike track will be squeezed into our current four lanes into a five lane road that will be comprised of two lanes for parking, two lanes for driving and one lane for bicycles. What do you think? Should the traffic lanes of Washington Street be dangerously narrowed to add two bicycle lanes to accommodate the thousands and thousands of bikers that we do not have in our city? How will this affect any future plowing of snow? How will this affect people trying to get on or off the buses? Will the bike track just become an extension of the pedestrian sidewalk, providing no benefit to bicyclists? We must be realistic and realize we cannot fit in everything on such a busy thoroughfare.
Mary Ondrejka