The planning firm hired by Hoboken to prepare solutions to the city’s parking shortage presented a draft version of their Master Parking Plan to the public at a meeting on Tuesday. The potential changes, which range from repainting curbs to building new garages, are intended to be executed over a five-year period.
Last year, the city hired Arup, a nationally-recognized planning firm with offices in New York City and Newark, to develop a suite of proposals that could address the chronic and sometimes overwhelming demand for parking in the mile-square city.
The draft master plan that was discussed on Tuesday will be presented to the full City Council at their meeting next week, and the combined input from the council, the public, and other city stakeholders will be used to create a final master plan.
The recommendations in the final report will not be binding, but some of them are likely to be taken up by the administration and City Council.
The latest meeting took place on Tuesday, Sept. 9 at the Multi-Service Center on Grand Street.
Running out of room
As Hoboken has grown, so have its parking issues. Most of the city’s 14,000 new residents between 2000 and 2013 are young and affluent, making them more likely to have cars. However, according to Arup, 60 percent of the Hoboken households that do have cars don’t use them to commute to work, creating a growing need for car storage during the weekday.
While 9,195 Hoboken residents drive out of the city to work every day, 8,488 non-resident employees drive into the city, leaving little extra space for visitors and commercial vehicles.
According to Arup Associate Principal Trent Lethco, the historic layout of Hoboken is a big part of what attracts people to the city, but it also creates “a housing stock…that really is kind of misaligned with how we live today” because it doesn’t provide off-street parking.
As a result, according to data gathered by Arup, there are just over 13,000 on-street resident permits in the city but only 8,900 curbside spaces (Lethco said his team did not have time to do a full inventory of vacancies in municipal parking garages).
One key issue is the city’s fee structure, which incentivizes street parking over garages. On-street parking permits are only $15 per year for residents, whereas the cheapest permit that allows residents to park in city garages all day long is $160 per month.
“One would think based on the way permits are issued…that Hoboken is awash in parking supply,” said Lethco.
Parking fees for visitors give the same backwards signal. In the middle of a weekday, two hours at a metered spot cost $2, versus $10 for the same period in a municipal garage. Lethco said the price of on-street permits should probably be raised, while the rates for garages should fall.
Resident concerns emphasized
At the previous public meeting on parking in June, and in an online survey, “people made it overwhelmingly clear that resident needs needed to come first,” according to Lethco. That preference was reflected in the recommendations presented by Arup on Tuesday, with many changes aimed at guaranteeing on-street parking availability for residents.
Proposed reforms include adding meters to the visitor side of streets, increasing the rates on meters, extending hours for parking meters, and replacing all-day visitor permits with “overnight permits” that can only be used when meters are not operating.
Permitted resident drivers are not subject to the meters.
In addition, Arup suggested limiting when and where business permits, which cost $200 per year and are used by non-Hoboken residents who work in the city, are valid. Under the changes, the permits would only allow on-street parking north of Sixth Street and west of Willow Avenue. They also couldn’t be used between midnight and 8 a.m., with the exception of businesses open during those hours.
On Thursday, Mayor Zimmer said that if meter rates were raised, the extra revenue would be reinvested into infrastructure like new garages.
First a nudge, then a push
Arup’s short-term recommendations are focused on discouraging car usage and car ownership by providing alternative options rather than increasing regulation. One such effort would pepper the city with wayfinding signs that display walking times and distances between garages and points of interest.
“Most trips wouldn’t require the use of a car based on distance,” said Lethco, “but you don’t really know that when you’re in the city.”
More substantively, Arup advocated creating consolidated “community mobility hubs” where residents can hail a variety of alternate transportation options, including NJ Transit buses, Hop shuttles, bikeshare, taxis, and Hertz Corner Cars.
Already, Hoboken boasts the highest rate of public transportation usage of any American city, according to Forbes magazine’s website.
In seeking to nudge residents away from using their cars for short trips within Hoboken, Arup is relying first on smaller changes that can facilitate informed decision-making without directly regulating unsustainable behavior. Larger changes like building new parking structures or limiting the number of resident permits per household are mentioned only as long-term options in need of further study.
According to Councilman-at-Large Jim Doyle, past attempts to directly limit the number of cars in Hoboken through regulation have failed before the City Council.
Proposed upgrades to the façades of Hoboken’s River Street municipal garages are a perfect example of the kind of choice engineering Arup advances. The current 70s-era structures, said Lethco, are “not the kind of place you really want to be in.”
“When you survey shoppers, diners, and people who use garages,” he continued, “they really want to see bright, vibrant, inviting environments. They want to have visual access to other people in the garage as well as the outside.”
However, some of the residents at Wednesday’s meeting feared that the culture of cars was too strong, especially among Hoboken’s young and affluent. Long-time Hoboken resident Ira Landgarten doubted that his fellow residents would be able to shake America’s petroleum-driven society and get rid of their cars.
“The reality is you have the simple material physics of space and the fact that you have a lifestyle that people demand having big cars in a pre-automotive town,” he said.
Landgarten himself still has a car, but he said he has downsized to a PT Cruiser, and likely would have gotten rid of it as well if his residence didn’t come with a private off-street parking spot.
Pilots programmed
While most of the ideas for parking reform will have to wait for City Council deliberation, a few are already in motion. Last week, the council approved going out to bid for a valet service that will ferry cars from two downtown stands to available spaces in municipal garages during the weekend. And this past Thursday, Hoboken announced the relaunch of its Hop Shuttles, which circle the city on three set routes, picking up anyone who hails them. The Hop bus fleet is all new and can be tracked through the SmartTraxx app on iOS and Android devices. The fare is normally $1, but the shuttles will be free through the end of October starting on Monday, Sept. 15.
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.