Dear Editor:
It seems that the construction of the automated parking garage at 916 Park Avenue has run into a few problems. Living nearby, I have always objected to the project’s chosen site, crammed in between residential buildings, because of the negative impact it will have on the traffic and the quality of life in my neighborhood. Since it is the first attempt at an automated parking garage in the United States, we are the guinea pigs in an ill-conceived experiment for dealing with the parking problems attendant to out of control urban development.
Four years ago, I received a flyer claiming that this garage would hold 260 cars. A year and a half later, that number rose to 324, which is the number still quoted in the press. But recently I was told by one of the construction workers that the number of spaces constructed is actually 389, which exceeds the number for which the Zoning Board approval was given.
The original flyer said that each car would require four minutes to be conveyed to its slot. When we pointed out at the Zoning Board hearing that this would require three or four hours to park 130 cars at the evening rush hour, clogging up the already congested north end of Hoboken, the Parking Authority’s engineer claimed that each car would actually take only one minute to park. The same construction worker I talked with said that they were straining the capacity of the machinery to reduce the transit time to two minutes, which would increase the noise and the danger of the malfunction and would still leave 150 cars waiting in line for several hours to park at rush hour. I am wondering what affect these changes in specifications has had on recently publicized construction problems involving the misalignments of the conveyance structures between the eastern and western sides of the structure.
Robotic Parking, Inc., was hired as the sub-contractor to install the computerized system to make the structure automatic. That firm is one of the few that has had any experience building a successfully functioning automated garage. According to reports in this paper, dealing with the misalignment problem has required four of their engineers to spend three additional months to reconfigure the computer technology at a cost of $100,000. Such precision is necessary to allow each car to be conveyed to its slot without being wrecked in the process. But unbelievably, the Belcor/Megan Group, the contractor who built the misaligned structure, fired Robotic Parking on October 5 without paying them for their work or allowing them to complete it, resulting in a lawsuit.
This has forced the Parking Authority to hire an automate garage specialist for $25,000 because, according to City Director Bob Murray, “there is some question about whether the garage can even be constructed at all.” The specialist makes no guarantees that the Parking Authority will be able to find another technology to operate the garage. So Robotic Parking may be the only engineering firm qualified to install the technology and according to them, they were within a few months of correcting the alignment problem. Now the project is mired in a lawsuit with taxpayer dollars going into the pockets of lawyers and consultants.
Now the Parking Authority’s financial analysts are recommending that they re-finance the $6.1 million bond that they floated to build the project. The City of Hoboken has just agreed to guarantee another $36 million bond for the Parking Authority to build another parking garage across from St. Mary Hospital, again in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Why are more taxpayer dollars being devoted to such risky and environmentally damaging projects when those spent so far are going down the drain?
I believe that Robotic Parking is being used as a scapegoat to cover up costly mistakes made in constructing the automated garage. Already ten million dollars has been spent on a ghost of a building. Someone is gong to have to be responsible for this fiasco and it better not be Hoboken’s tax paying citizens.
Mary Ondrejka