Re: Bike JC's 7th Annual Ward Tour & Festival June 5
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Registration for Bike JC's 7th annual Jersey City Ward Tour is now open!
REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED, FREE ($5 suggested donation), and available now at our website here: REGISTER The 2016 tour will roll at 11 a.m. Sunday, June 5, from its new start at City Hall. We'll finish in beautiful Liberty State Park for the first time, and we'll have our Finish Line Festival there all afternoon, with food trucks, a beer garden, live bands including Jersey favorites The NERDS, and the Horizon Wellness Village. The route is very similar to last year's except for the start and finish, approx. 15 miles. Helmets are required for everyone on a bike. You can find much more information on Bike JC's website at the registration link above, and also on our Facebook event page here: FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE VOLUNTEERS NEEDED FOR THE TOUR! Meeting Wednesday 7:30 p.m. We also need lots of volunteers June 5 to help with registration, ride as marshals, sell our T-shirts, etc. So if you can help, please sign up here: VOLUNTEER SIGNUP Also, please attend a meeting for all Ward Tour volunteers this Wednesday, May 18, 7:30 p.m. at City Hall, 280 Grove St., 2nd Floor, in the Council Chambers. We'll plan assignments, and we'll have posters for you to hang in your neighborhoods. Please try to make it, but if you can't you can still volunteer! We may call one more meeting closer to June 5. Thank you! The Jersey City Ward Tour is presented in partnership with the City of Jersey City, Mayor Steven M. Fulop, the Jersey City Municipal Council, and the Office of Cultural Affairs. Welcome to our new principal sponsor: The Horizon Foundation for New Jersey!
Posted on: 2016/5/16 16:24
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Bike JC's 7th Annual Ward Tour & Festival June 5
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Save the date and ride with us!!
Bike JC's 7th Annual Jersey City Ward Tour and Festival will be held Sunday, June 5. We'll bike about 15 miles all around the city at an easy pace?with a couple thousand friends! After the ride, enjoy a finish-line festival, including live bands, great food and a beer garden. Free registration is required, and we expect to open it online in early May. Rain date June 12. We'll have much more information shortly, here and on our website at www.bikejc.org. Facebook: Bike JC Twitter: @bikejc Instagram: @bikejcgram
Posted on: 2016/3/29 5:42
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Re: Citi Bike
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I'm assuming you won't mind if I put this on Bike JC's Facebook too?
Posted on: 2016/3/11 18:40
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Re: proposal for changing R1 zoning to R5 in Downtown JC
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Agree with brewster that more of the little nooks designed for retail should be retail.
Neighborhood retail, if expanded throughout the city, doesn't make parking worse. It makes car ownership less necessary because people can walk and bike for most of their errands.
Posted on: 2016/3/11 18:01
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Re: proposal for changing R1 zoning to R5 in Downtown JC
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This sounds great! Increased density while following historical building patterns, attracting fewer new cars per capita.
NIMBY eruption in 3, 2, 1 ...
Posted on: 2016/3/8 19:37
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Re: Parking Permit to 11:00 PM
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Maintaining outdated street parking policies in a whole neighborhood just because City Hall is there would be ridiculous. They have to meet a whole variety of other needs, as this policy is trying to do.
HOWEVER, I will say this for Yvonne's argument: I am probably as anti-parking as anyone in this city, but City Hall does have a unique role for everyone in the city, including those from its most distant and car-centric neighborhoods, and that can't be compromised. A council meeting is one of the few amenities for which a resident of, say, southern Greenville or the northwest Heights will never be able to "shop locally." Yes, more of those people should be coming here by mass transit, zip car, Uber, taxi, bike, bike share, etc., and gradually more of them will, but it's probably fair to bend over backwards a bit in this case, because #democracy. So if there were some provision for providing or preserving extra car parking ON SITE at City Hall, or RIGHT next to it, that wouldn't be such a bad thing. Leave the rest of the neighborhood parking rules to Candice.
Posted on: 2016/2/26 16:43
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Re: Plan to lower parking minimums in Jersey City spurs anger
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NJ's suburban-ness also means that its cities have less sway in Trenton than one huge, unified city would have in an otherwise sparsely populated state. So when people here ask for more mass transit funding, we're less likely to get it. But this is one more reason why having a bigger, car-lighter JC (and Newark, and Hoboken, etc.) in future years is important: It creates a bigger urban constituency to put pressure on Trenton (and by extension, D.C.) for mass transit and other needs of growing cities to let them grow further ... it primes that virtuous cycle. There's a tipping point to this that will be reached fairly soon, when the entire northeastern NJ urban cluster?and all its political leaders?will be focused more on urban transit than on cars. The sooner it comes, the better we can get on with being real cities. I LOVE mass transit, BTW. (Queens native, subway nerd from an early age.) I used to spend more time ranting about it the PATH and NJTransit, but I realized that biking is something more easily controlled by a city, and that's one reason I now focus on it. Biking amenities are relatively cheap, and if they move us away from the car, even a little, they will help us build momentum for other urban needs?mass transit first among them. #PartOfThePlan
Posted on: 2016/2/25 21:39
Edited by elsquid on 2016/2/25 21:54:59
Edited by elsquid on 2016/2/25 21:58:17 |
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Re: Plan to lower parking minimums in Jersey City spurs anger
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You're right that car-free or car-light living will initially attract more new arrivals who are single, who are childless, who rent, or otherwise have demographic advantages for it. I disagree that this cohort is somehow less beneficial, in part because I am all those things and spend basically all my free time lately pushing for better transportation in JC, most pointedly biking. And some of the most active advocates and volunteers I work with are free to be so active, in part, because they aren't taking care of two toddlers. Of those car-free arrivals, yes, many will eventually have families, and some will leave JC, but some of them will stay here, and maybe buy one tiny smart car instead of a mini-van and a sedan, as their more motor-minded forebears did. It happened in Brooklyn neighborhoods. And I know some very fine families here who have exactly that story. That's progress!
Posted on: 2016/2/25 21:03
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Re: Plan to lower parking minimums in Jersey City spurs anger
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It's totally fair to differentiate JC from Manhattan and compare it to Queens?but of course, similar things are brewing in the "downtowny" parts of Queens, with the NYC administration pushing for lower parking minimums in zones with a decent combination of proximity to trains and lower existing car ownership. (That vast multi-boro plan focuses on various kinds of affordable housing, but the aim is the same: allow more housing for people while attracting fewer cars per capita.) As for "flooding the streets," I had thought you agreed with me on this: Build more 1:1 off-street parking now to (maybe) mitigate "flooding" of existing street parking space? = ultimately attract greater percentage of newcomers with cars = worsen the "flooding" of existing street DRIVING space. You end up with a city full of new parking tributaries to the same old little river. Parking space can be expanded off-street, but driving space is finite. Have you been to Downtown Newark lately, the land of a thousand barren, looming parking garages? I work there, in a building with a great view of major roads. Have you tried to drive there at rush hour? Talk about flooding! And that's mostly just 9-5 office buildings. I can't imagine having to drive in a more mixed area like DTJC if it had that much parking skulking around in it, feeding in cars at many times of day. The ... horror. Here's yet another reason why focusing on "saving" street parking space via minimums, instead of saving driving space by lowering them, is misguided: Street parking is easier for local government to improve and mitigate by other means, besides expansion. It features static spaces and stationary cars and visible city-issued stickers and such?lots of chess pieces to move. As others have mentioned here, you can change the eligibility rules, raise the fees, shift the times?the kinds of sensible mitigation that Candice Osborne is working on. We should do more of that! But once cars are in motion, eating up driving space, it's all fluid. It's nearly impossible to segregate them, to grant any grandfathered rights, neighborhood-based rights, or whatever. You're all just basically a blob of traffic. Urban cyclists like me will get more cycling amenities over time; that demand is only growing. And we're hardy; we'll hold our breath and thread our way through those bigger and bigger traffic jams. But I'll say it again: It's you, the guy who really needs to drive, who will suffer from them the most.
Posted on: 2016/2/25 20:56
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Re: Plan to lower parking minimums in Jersey City spurs anger
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I for one am not arguing that YOU can't have a car, or that many parents and others who find they need cars can't have them. The policies we're talking about aren't designed to drive you out, they're designed so that the new people we attract are more likely to be those without cars. That's vital for your sake as much as anyone's, because while off-street parking space can be expanded, on-street driving space can't. As the city grows, we MUST decrease the per-capita rate of car ownership, or we'll just have more and more people competing to drive more and more cars in the same, finite amount of street space?and ultimately, you, the driver, will suffer as much from that as anyone, maybe more.
Posted on: 2016/2/25 18:08
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Re: Plan to lower parking minimums in Jersey City spurs anger
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Exactly. All other measures for walkability/bikeability/livability of cities are great and necessary, with mass transit being especially in need of improvement around here; however, all those measures are undermined when you simultaneously cater to the car.
Monroe: Why make libertarian/choice arguments here? Love them or hate them, parking minimums aren't the free market, they're government regulation. And much of car monoculture is supported by huge subsidies from the general tax base, from excessive road construction, to virtually free parking on publicly owned and maintained street space, to wars protecting oil dictatorships ... This is one thing that always amazes me about the empire of the car: How few people realize that it's actually supported by a perverted socialism, a collection of big-gummint/crony-corporate programs, horribly misdirected to encourage the most destructive mode of land transportation.
Posted on: 2016/2/25 16:43
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Re: Plan to lower parking minimums in Jersey City spurs anger
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Developers' last-minute changes are a totally valid concern, and they happen too often.
But in this case: --The change requested is one that should be made for the good of the neighborhood, Downtown, and the city. It's intrinsically a good thing, and I don't need some giveback in exchange. I don't care if the developer builds a few more units and makes more money. That's even better. Less parking, more density, both good things for a less car-centric city. --I can see why any developer, right now, would feel free to ask for this late in the process, because the concept, reducing parking minimums, has been gathering steam around the country. I don't love any last-minute change, and maybe there are some more hoops we should make them jump through. Maybe this should be rejected. But I don't see this a something done in horribly bad faith, rather just reacting to something that's increasingly seen as a win-win for developers and urban neighborhoods. So I think we should try to find a way to accept it, if that can be done without too much violence to law and procedure, setting a bad precedent, etc.
Posted on: 2016/2/23 14:46
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Re: Parking garages/lots?
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Yvonne, sorry, but showing that cars are necessary for some is an argument for preserving some parking, which everybody here agrees with. It's not an argument for creating more.
Posted on: 2016/2/23 2:07
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Re: Parking garages/lots?
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Sillyscorp, one way to make neighborhood parking available for those who actually need it is to stop giving away street parking for free. $15/yr is essentially free. Raise it to $50 a year, and signal that it will rise again in future, and some of those with suburban car hangovers will give up their cars, making room for you. That was my story in 1998: I had moved from the burbs and a car-centric job earlier, but it took a while to figure out that having a car was now silly.
Posted on: 2016/2/22 23:37
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Re: Parking garages/lots?
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Where did that 38% figure come from? It makes perfect sense, and it's exactly what's supposed to happen. Less parking per capita leads to larger percentages of new arrivals choosing not to bring one, which furthers that trend. It can also lead to established residents giving up cars, as I did years ago when my last one croaked. Yvonne isn't nuts to drive here. She needs a car for all the reasons she mentions. And it seems intuitive to her and others that life behind the wheel will get easier (or get harder more slowly) if we add more parking. But the truth is just the opposite. The more off-street PARKING space we add (an expandable capacity), the more people like me will own cars without really needing them. And when they drive, it will further diminish our DRIVING space?a finite capacity in a mature urban street grid. Meanwhile, businesses and other institutions will remain tempted to sprawl out along highways and barren stretches of "arterial" roads reachable most easily by car, instead of nestling into each neighborhood in search of walking and biking customers. It's the latter pattern?actually the pattern on which this city was built, before the car?that we need to encourage, for everyone's sake, including drivers. This is one of the ironies of the pro-parking lobby: They're cutting off their noses to spite their faces. They can make it marginally easier to park their cars, but only by making it harder to drive.
Posted on: 2016/2/22 21:57
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Re: Kennedy Blvd. Any chance for light rail since buses are packed?
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We also desperately need to raise the gas tax to reflect the true costs of driving (not a local issue, I know).
Regressive? Yes. So feel free to dedicate it solely to expenditures that benefit the car-owning low-income workers it hits hardest, including projects that improve the roads they drive on so they're not constantly saddled with car-repair costs.
Posted on: 2016/2/19 17:13
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Re: Kennedy Blvd. Any chance for light rail since buses are packed?
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There's another HUGE reason why these things don't get built.
You've already noted that the car culture is an obstacle because it hangs on to virtually free street parking space, and utterly free street driving space, like grim death, leaving little room for any other mode in existing right-of-ways. But it also saps the demand, real and projected, for mass transit. The streetcar companies knew they could could win public and governmental approval for building their systems, and could then attract riders, because the inland alternatives were walking or horse carriages. Even when cars came in, at first they were for only the wealthy few and not much competition. Anyone who wants more mass transit in JC needs to make hard choices to move us at least a little closer to that environment again at the same time. We have to stop shoveling so much public money into subsidizing driving and private car ownership. We should start by doubling the residential parking permit fee to $30, and signaling that it will go up incrementally in the future. That would begin to recoup some of the true cost of our massive street parking giveaway of prime publicly owned and maintained land. But it would also help create a bigger constituency for the mass transit projects that the city actually needs, and increasingly will need, as it grows.
Posted on: 2016/2/19 16:59
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Re: Bike Share System
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They are in line with some projections I've heard. Citi Bike JC just announced an expansion, and that would not be happening if the numbers weren't at least adequate by their lights. They originally left expansion conditional on adding a decent number of new members. Hoboken's bike share (Hudson Bike Share) is completely unrelated. Their parking bikes at JC public racks Downtown has become a bone of contention, as has their individual members' occasionally leaving their bikes in inappropriate places in JC, apparently. But in fairness, having their bikes in JC does give us the chance to jump on them and ride to Hoboken on a day pass. I actually am an annual member of both, and I'll probably do this on occasion.
Posted on: 2016/2/19 15:35
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Re: Bike Share System
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Stats from 2015, rounded (from the JC launch September 21 to year-end):
53,000+ trips within Jersey City 4,600 members with JC addresses 1,700 of those are new members since the JC launch Stats are from Citi Bike JC via the mayor's office.
Posted on: 2016/2/18 21:23
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Re: Parking Too Close to Crosswalks
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Not commenting on any other subject here, but I know that intersection pretty well, and in my opinion the illegal parking on the outside of the turn contributes to the turning problems ... which is why it's illegal. A truck could swing wider around the inside vehicle if it weren't going to hit the outside vehicle. Don't know if it would clear that way, but whatever.
Posted on: 2016/2/17 17:55
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Re: Proposed Development at 8th Street/Division
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Yeah, I heard something was going in the same general area but on the 7th St., but it could be the same project.
Posted on: 2016/2/13 2:02
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Re: Proposed Development at 8th Street/Division
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It's kind of a thing. YIMBYism, pre-emptively taking the chance to support something reasonably worthy that is normally a target for strident NIMBYism, so as not to let the latter have the first 10,000 words on every subject. Not that opposing various changes in one's neighborhood is necessarily wrong, but it is often louder and more passionate than arguments for those same changes, which can end up in a very unbalanced debate.
Posted on: 2016/2/12 22:52
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Re: Proposed Development at 8th Street/Division
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This is a block from my apartment, so I'm thrilled for the opportunity to support it and not be a NIMBY.
It's close to the bus lines and a Citi Bike JC dock on Newark, and it takes a scrappy space at the edge of my elegant old neighborhood without razing anything memorable or sticking out like a sore thumb in the middle of it. All hail urban infill.
Posted on: 2016/2/11 19:39
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Re: Hoboken is rejecting bike lanes
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The understandable, but faulty, argument made in support of double parking in business strips is that it's just overflow from the customers and suppliers who are single parking. Single isn't enough, so we need double. I don't know for sure about every space on Washington, but that's usually not the case.
In Newark last year, the city put in a protected bike lane on Mount Prospect Avenue, and within months the merchants complained that it stopped the "vital" double parking in front of their businesses. The city was prepared to remove the bike lane. But with some research by biking advocates, it was discovered that while the DOUBLE parkers were, in fact, mostly customers and vendors, much of the SINGLE parking was being taken up by people parking for many hours days at a time (sometimes illegally), employees parking for whole shifts, and other cars unrelated to the vital "quick stops" the businesses were missing. The city put in meters to make the single parking serve the businesses much better, the longer-term and employee parking migrated to spots in the side streets (which wasn't that hard since resident car commuters were away at work during the day). And all sides agreed to keep the protected bike lane. Hoboken's plan, developed over 17 months, already provided for more short-term parking for quick stops and deliveries, in advance, in response to earlier input from businesses.
Posted on: 2016/2/11 17:05
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Re: Serious accident on Newark Ave near 4th/5th Streets
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Agreed. There are many solutions to improving traffic safety, already proven effective in a wide variety of other places. Most of them will work here, but few of them will reach maximum effectiveness in their earliest low-key trial stages. Let's expand and improve them. Quote: Candice Osborne included a trial of bump outs in a presentation on parking (http://www.slideshare.net/candiceosbo ... y-parking-recommendations), does anyone know if there has been any movement on implementing the bump out trial? We're kinda mixing up "bumpouts" and "daylighting," though they're related concepts that are often implemented together. We definitely have "daylighting" now, I think in three intersections at present. You can see it at First St. and Erie St. outside Torico's ice cream shop. Those use bollards a ways back from each corner, on either side. Their main focus is to block the illegal parking discussed in this thread, thus improving sight lines at intersections. I don't know if there are any genuine "bumpouts" in JC yet, not the kind you see in Hoboken. Those are the ones where bollards are placed out directly around the corner, and a few feet out into the intersections, to force traffic around them in a more squared-off turn, while the pedestrian crossing is shortened. The few bollards right at the corner on, uh, Magnolia I think, near the old Brennan courthouse, might qualify as a true bumpout, though I get the feeling someone just threw those up to stop people from hitting stuff on that already-tight corner.
Posted on: 2016/2/3 21:55
Edited by elsquid on 2016/2/3 22:17:50
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Re: Storefronts not shoveled
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Interesting point.
Posted on: 2016/1/26 23:19
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Re: Storefronts not shoveled
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It's totally fair to distrust either governments or less-responsible owners, especially since neither really does a great job of it in any city. But then what do you do? That's why I think some combination of one backing up the other might be best.
Posted on: 2016/1/26 22:55
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Re: Storefronts not shoveled
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I am absolutely relating it to favoritism toward driving, which it absolutely both partially stems from and concretely perpetuates. But whatever, you're right, it is a legitimate issue on its own. I agree with more fines, but that's probably not enough. Big, absentee owners?including some you might not expect, like churches?just absorb fines. What is, it, $110? That barely registers with some developer holding a vacant lot for future development. That's why I think there needs to be some government backup, with billing to recoup the cost of the work. This stuff needs to get done. It's a safety issue, not some pie-in-the-sky gummint program.
Posted on: 2016/1/26 22:43
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Re: Storefronts not shoveled
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That's hilarious! I'm sure the elderly people slipping and breaking hips will see the humor.
Posted on: 2016/1/26 21:51
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