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Only a drunk politician could utter an oxymoronic phrase like that.


To add to the the earlier post, I think we need some BIKE LANES.

All this political hot air about going GREEN is a lot of nonsense when the taxpayer will soon be asked to bail out GM, Ford, and Chrysler so they can continue to build gas guzzling behemoths.
And we STILL don't have any bike lanes in Jersey City
and Ed Koch closed the ones in Manhattan 20 years ago.

And please tell me what is GREEN about building parking spaces that don't LOOK like parking sopaces...all they do is use MORE concrete (which takes a LOT of energy.)

Expanded PATH service would be great, i know they are looking at trains with more cars along the NWK-WTC line, but new routes are needed.

Using the 6th street embankment and Bergan arches is an easy no-brainer for the light rail, Erie RR cut that right of way years ago and it is just sitting there.

In an ideal world the PATH would tunnel North and South of JSQ making a new line under the palisade ridge...this will never happen though, and if so it will take 6583937945.837years judging by the 2nd ave subway.

Extending the light rail across the bayonne bridge into Staten island would be interesting also, i heard they were considering this at one point.

To get rid of any of the cars, we need:

Bike lanes
More transit capacity
More transit services
Bike lanes
Bike parking
Sidewalks that aren't cracked/broken/covered in trash/fenced off/smeared with dog poo/riddled with holes and ruts
Bike lanes
Bike/pedestrian friendly urban design (not setting buildings 50 feet back from the sidewalk and behind a wall or fence i.e. Jersey City Med Ctr and others).
Re-striped crosswalks
Raised crosswalks
ENFORCEMENT OF TRAFFIC LAWS. People don't want to walk or bike where they fear for their lives. JCPD, write tickets to people who run stop signs. Better yet, JCPD, don't run stop signs yourselves! Get the bikes to use the streets (install bike lanes first) instead of sidewalks.
Bike lanes
Pedestrian signals. Lots of intersections lack them.
Did I say bike lanes and enforcement of traffic laws yet?

Until the public transportation within Jersey City is plentiful and reliable, becoming car-less is not an option for most people living here. My neighborhood's bus transportation to Journal Square is such a crap shoot, I take a cab home on most evenings. Thankfully, I get dropped off in the mornings but the one time I had to take the bus, I waited 40 minutes. I think we'll keep the car.

Doesn't matter if it's all the way over by Liberty State Park, the Whole Foods will transport its customers on magic rainbows of smugness.

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Maybe your walk to the grocery store won't be as long once Whole Foods moves to the neighborhood...

Jersey City officials share 'vision' for Journal Square with public

by The Jersey Journal
Sunday October 26, 2008, 1:56 PM

Most Journal Square residents and business owners said they were impressed by the city's plan to revamp their neighborhoods presented Thursday night at School 11 on Bergen Avenue, Journal staff writer Paul Koepp tells us in tomorrow's newspaper.

But they also said it's difficult to foresee any imminent progress toward the "vision" that Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy said would make the Square and the surrounding 244 acres "cleaner, greener, more prosperous and more affordable," according to Koepp.

"Very positive," was the verdict of Ken Graham, owner of office space and a parking lot on Pavonia Ave., after a two-hour slide show that pictured a redesigned PATH station, a cluster of skyscrapers, new swaths of green space and tree-lined streets, Koepp writes.

"Something is going to happen, I know that," he said. "If you build it, people will come."

Jordan Galatz, the owner of the Midas on Kennedy Boulevard and president of the Journal Square Special Improvement District board, agreed.

"The whole concept is really very positive," he said. "It's up to the local politicians and developers to see it through, and hopefully they will."

Koepp tells us that plan displayed Thursday was the result of feedback that consultants received at two public workshops earlier this year, officials said. It calls for up to 15,000 new housing units, nine acres of parks, a new light rail line to the waterfront and a trolley to McGinley Square.

The City Council will need to declare Journal Square an "area in need of rehabilitation" before a complete redevelopment plan can be adopted, officials said. The city could then use eminent domain to take private properties to create parks or expand roads, but there are no plans to use it for private developments, according to Jersey City Redevelopment Agency Executive Director Robert Antonicello.

Explain to me how to get my UPS packages from Secaucus without a car when my well meaning relatives send me Xmas gifts, or how to get to Home Depot without risking my life crossing all that Holland Tunnel traffic, or how to lug a week's worth of groceries 7 blocks without all the frozen stuff melting in the summer, and I'll be more than willing to get rid of my car.

Fine. Great. I'm all for Jersey weaning people off the car culture, but what are they doing to increase mass transit capacity as well as broaden its reach (so more areas are served) and improve service??? Or are they just gonna cram more bodies onto the already crowded PATH? And how about bike paths or bike and pedestrian friendly roads?

A Back Seat for Parking Space - Jersey City: weaning ourselves from parking/driving culture.

New York Times
By ANTOINETTE MARTIN
Published: October 24, 2008

AS many of New Jersey?s older, larger cities continue transforming themselves into more mass-transit-oriented New Urbanist centers, a classic feature of the gritty old days is starting to shrivel and disappear from view: parking garages.

Cities are increasingly requiring that street-level parking structures have ?active front-door uses? like retail shops, offices or community centers. Newark?s downtown redevelopment area is a case in point. In other cases, city planners are requiring designs to disguise parking structures with architectural flourishes, or wrap them inside or behind other buildings.

Cities including Newark and Jersey City are imposing parking-space maximums, and reducing minimum requirements, at new construction sites, in order to reflect and encourage increased use of mass transit.

Another reason for limits is the soaring cost of parking structures ? which consultants for the Urban Land Institute of New Jersey estimate at $20,000 to $30,000 per space, depending on the type of construction.

?We are attempting to wean ourselves from the parking/driving culture,? said Newark?s deputy mayor, Stefan Pryor, ?although, obviously, some structured parking is necessary with large-scale residential developments.?

In the 50-acre redevelopment area around the Broad Street train station in Newark, Mr. Pryor said, a maximum limit of 1.5 spaces per unit has been set, with a space-per-unit maximum within a block of the station. The station is now handling 7,000 passengers a day, he noted, and it is reasonable to assume that fewer and fewer nearby residents own cars.

At the New Jersey Institute of Technology campus ? a five-block walk down Martin Luther King Boulevard from the Broad Street station, or a five-minute light-rail ride from Newark Penn Station ? Robert A. Altenkirch, the university president, says redevelopment efforts do involve a new five- or six-story parking garage.

But the garage will actually be freeing up space, said Mr. Altenkirch and the project director, Cubie Dawson of Jones Lang LaSalle, by replacing surface lots and permitting the university to grow without increasing its land ?footprint.?

Also, said Mr. Dawson, the new garage will have street-level retail space for a market, pharmacy or other amenity that would help knit campus and community together.

In Cranford, where the area across South Street from a transit station is being redeveloped, street-level retailing has been incorporated into a design for a four-story residential building that wraps around three sides of a three-story parking garage.

Similarly, in Morristown, a parking structure built with recycled materials and rooftop solar panels is to be wrapped inside new condominiums going up downtown beside the Historic Green. Angelo Alberto of the architecture firm Alberto & Associates, a specialist in development, said ?wrapper? buildings were the strongest trend in parking structure design today.

But other design techniques are also being employed to avoid the ?dead zones,? as Mayor Pryor of Newark referred to the solid dark facades created by traditional parking structures.

In the French Street redevelopment area of New Brunswick, Jarmel Kizel Architects designed an 875-car garage to be sandwiched between a 10-story medical-offices building and an 11-story residential tower, according to Matthew B. Jarmel, a principal at the firm.

To keep heating and ventilation costs down, he said, the parking structure was created with open floors. But ?if you do an open structure, it can be really ugly,? and the sloped flooring to facilitate drainage is not pleasing to the eye. So the architects designed a skin for the structure that makes it appear to have horizontal levels. Fake windows made of reflective glass were attached to the facade, and there are brick inserts simulating those on the residential building?s exterior.

In Jersey City last week, city officials unveiled a plan to remake traffic-congested Journal Square into a place with open plazas and pedestrian walkways, new housing, retailing and office buildings ? and no new structured parking.

Under the plan, which architects referred to as a more European model, only taxis, local buses, light rail and bicycles would be permitted in the square, and trolley cars would transport people from one shopping or entertainment site to another. No private cars would enter the square.

?Three remote parking structures are proposed to intercept cars from the Pulaski Skyway, the New Jersey Turnpike and State Highway 139 before they enter the square,? explained Dean Marchetto, whose architecture firm was one of two hired to create a model for the now-deteriorated urban hub.

New Jersey residents may be famously devoted to their cars, but Mr. Marchetto said that at a series of community planning meetings, city residents said what they really wanted to see in Journal Square was more park space and walking paths.

Darius Sollohub, an associate professor of architecture at N.J.I.T. who specializes in parking issues, said the latest thinking among urban planners was that vertical parking garages can be considered environmentally friendly because they reduce the amount of surface parking ? permitting more green space and less pollution from run-off water.

?It may seem like a bit of an oxymoron that garages could be green,? he said, ?but decreasing the amount of impervious ground cover can be very beneficial in cities where runoff is the No. 1 pollutant.?