The city of Hoboken moved one step closer to bringing the first major initiative of its comprehensive parking plan to fruition this week. On Tuesday, the City Council approved an ordinance designating the visitor parking side of every block in Hoboken as metered parking zones. However, parkers who have a business or other permit won’t have to pay.
Expanding and modernizing the city’s parking meters was one of the recommendations included in the Parking Master Plan prepared by nationally-recognized planning firm Arup. The plan was presented to the City Council last October.
Currently, visitors to town can stay in a visitor permit spot for up to four hours without a permit. With the meters, they will still be able to remain for four hours in the new spots, but must pay the machines. (In the business district, they can only pay for two hours.) The city also runs several municipal garages.
The visitor parking hang-tags that residents can buy for out-of-towners will be gradually phased out, but visitors will be allowed to park in Hoboken for longer periods as long as they move to a new meter spot every four hours, according to Transportation and Parking Director John Morgan.
The same black “smart meter” pay stations will be deployed as already exist in the business district.
The meter fee will continue to be $1 per hour, and the meters will still be inactive from 9 p.m. until 9 a.m., allowing any car to park on the visitor side unrestricted overnight. Sundays are also unrestricted.
Already underway
Tuesday’s ordinance expands a pilot program that deployed four-hour meters north of the Fourteenth Street Viaduct starting in 2012.
The new parking meters being installed in northeast Hoboken since December are not related to either this pilot or the new city-wide meter program. According to Morgan, they were meant to balance out spaces lost when Toll Brothers began construction on a new condo complex at Fourteenth and Washington streets.
“We can come down with a plow, but the payloader is what really gets the job done.”—Dawn Zimmer
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Paying by the plate
The changes approved Tuesday will gradually go into effect as the Hoboken Parking Utility orders and receives hundreds of new parking pay stations over the coming year.
Morgan said his department will place flyers on the windshields of cars parked nearby to educate them on the new system.
Councilman Peter Cunningham cautioned that the placement of the pay stations would be crucial.
“We’re going to have to be very strategic as to where these meters are going to go,” said Cunningham. “While I am supportive that we have this type of functionality to ensure that people pay for parking in Hoboken, we have to ensure that we don’t disrupt the…historic nature of our neighborhoods.”
The current plan is to have at least one pay station per block. As the meters are rolled out, Morgan hopes to institute a new payment system based on license plates, which would obviate the need to print a receipt and place it on one’s dashboard, as is required now. Customers could enter their plate number either at a pay station or through a smartphone app.
The digital pay stations accept credit cards as well as coins, but some still find them unwieldy, including Councilman David Mello. “I found those up arrows to be not super intuitive,” he said Tuesday, “and I still to this day can’t know how to subtract without just cancelling out the whole transaction.”
This past week exhibited one potential danger of a fully digital system. On Tuesday, credit card payment on some the city’s parking pay stations was temporarily disabled. Morgan said a glitch in the city’s wireless internet during a service upgrade caused some of the machines’ SIM cards to turn off.
Explaining the new system
Currently, most streets in Hoboken have two parking lanes; one side reserved exclusively for residential permit holders and one for visitors and holders of temporary and business permits. Holders of any type of permit, including residential permits, can park in the visitor lane without a four-hour limit. Those without permits can park in the visitor lane for free for up to four hours.
Some have criticized the signs designating parking lanes in Hoboken as obscure and bewildering. The residential side sign is green with white lettering, while the visitor side sign is white with green lettering. In addition, the visitor side signs read “Permit Parking Only,” even though visitors without permits are allowed to park there for up to four hours.
Zimmer has argued that meters will reduce this confusion by making the parking rules more intuitive.
“Visitors to any city know that when they see a parking meter, they are required to pay the meter,” she said last October, after the City Council approved a $5 million bond to fund the new meters.
Overall, the new system will be a mixed bag for drivers visiting Hoboken. Free daytime parking will be a thing of the past in Hoboken, but the fine for staying in a visitor spot too long will be lower.
Alternate side
A Zimmer-sponsored ordinance to more than triple the fine for violating Hoboken’s alternate side parking rules during snow cleaning advanced on first reading on Tuesday. The vote was 5- 4, with Council members Occhipinti, Mason, Castellano, and Michael Russo in opposition.
Under the proposed change to Hoboken’s city code, violations of alternate side rules “which interrupt the city’s snow cleaning and/or snow removal operations” would garner an immediate summons carrying a fine of $150, instead of the current $45 penalty.
Alternate side rules are primarily designed to allow street sweepers to operate, but after snowstorms, the city utilizes them to plow the parking lanes. In an interview last week, Zimmer said ensuring that every single car obeyed alternate side rules after snowstorm was an issue of fairness.
“With all the side streets,” she said, “if there’s even one car there, the payloader cannot fit through, and that’s what we need to really clean the streets…we can come down with a plow, but the payloader is what really gets the job done.”
After the snowstorm of Jan. 26-27, around 250 cars were ticketed for not obeying alternate side rules.
“We hope this $150 fine will really motivate people to move,” said Zimmer. “I’m not trying to be harsh. I’m trying to get people to move their car.”
Between its initial inclusion on the Feb. 3 council agenda last week and the meeting itself, the proposed alternate side ordinance was amended to clarify that the more expensive tickets would be issued only after snowstorms and not for regular street cleaning days.
That was not enough to satisfy the council dissenters.
“I still don’t think it’s warranted,” said Occhipinti. “I think we should be talking about towing those vehicles, not just giving them a fine.”
Zimmer said she thought towing was too extreme a step. The bare minimum fee for a tow in Hoboken is $100 on top of any parking tickets, though the money goes to the towing company, not the Parking Utility.
Councilman Cunningham “begrudgingly” provided the fifth vote to move the ordinance forward, but he said the city should ensure it was doing everything possible to notify drivers that their cars have to move.
Regarding the recent snowstorms, the city says it sent emails and robocalls to all parking permit holders, but Cunningham wondered aloud if the city’s database is up to date.
The ordinance still has to succeed in a second City Council vote at a later meeting in order to be enacted.
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.