hile it seems that the township council and officials do agree on one thing, that finding a solution to the parking situation at the Princeton Junction Train Station should be a priority in the redevelopment process, there have been varying suggestions by residents — some of them, commuters — on how to go about doing so.##M:[more]##
Suggestions ranging from increasing the number of trips on the Dinky line, to creating more busing along Route 571, to creating satellite parking and providing alternate transportation from neighboring towns like Plainsboro and Princeton were among the many offered by more than 80 residents who packed into the West Windsor Volunteer Fire Company station on December 8 for the first ever joint Parking Authority and Township Council meeting.
Some shared their parking woes, and others simply came out to emphasize they wanted their municipal leaders to come up with a solution. The Saturday meeting lasted well into the afternoon, until about 4 p.m.
Andy Lupo, chairman of the Parking Authority, also gave a presentation highlighting the current parking situation and assured the residents that the Parking Authority is studying its options and would work with the township council as redevelopment moves forward.
Resident Alan Burger told officials that the most frustrating experience he has had while living in the township for the past 23 years was getting parking at the train station. Years ago, he had a parking pass while commuting to New York for work, but when he retired, he gave it up. A couple years ago, he became very ill and needed to travel to New York for medical treatment, but finding a parking space at the station and still making it on time to appointments was very difficult.
“Why can’t you come up with some type of accommodation for people who have to travel to Philadelphia or New York for some type of medical care? Because it doesn’t exist today,” he said. The frustration of trying to find a parking spot at 10 or 11 a.m. to make an appointment at noon or 1 p.m. is “inhuman, and it makes no sense,” he said. “We’re residents, we’re taxpayers. We should have a guaranteed spot when we need it.”
In addition, he urged the council to make a decision soon and move forward with a plan that includes parking. “We’re looking to you, and leaders of the community to take leadership. Come up with a plan, sell us this plan, sell us a vision of what could this plan could be.”
Some residents suggested creating satellite parking in towns like Plainsboro and Princeton, or in places like the Quakerbridge Mall parking lot — which one resident said was empty during the weekday work hours — and providing busing or other means of rapid transportation to the Princeton Junction station.
Wesley Mostello, of Penn Lyle Road, was one of those residents who supported satellite parking, suggesting that it be done for both nonresidents and residents of West Windsor and that a bus service or jitney service go along with it to bring commuters to the station. If the township were to go with building a parking garage, he said, he would urge that it not be as big as a five-story garage and that the west side of the tracks not “have a wall of garage.” Regardless of how officials went about fixing the problem, it should be made clear that no tax money be used to finance it, he pointed out. Most residents during the meeting seemed to echo that sentiment.
Sapphire Drive resident Marshall Lerner threw a few different suggestions at the authority and council members. He also supported the satellite parking idea, saying the township should encourage Plainsboro to make parking accommodations for its own residents and provide some sort of bus transportation to the station. “That could relieve traffic, it could relieve some of the stress on West Windsor,” he said. “I think it’s an attraction that draws people to Plainsboro, and we should encourage them to be responsible in terms of meeting some of the regional needs.”
He also referred to a report issued a week before the meeting by Intercap Holdings CEO Steve Goldin, which estimated building a new parking garage would cost $29.2 million, and come out to $20,”000 a space. He also referred to some suggestions made during the charrettes that included offering township residents the opportunity to acquire a permit that would be transferable when selling their homes to help finance the building of additional parking. “Twenty thousand dollars is a very small portion of what a home sells for in West Windsor, and the availability of parking could make a home more attractive in terms of its marketability,” he said. He also suggested that the Dinky line be made free of charge to encourage more residents from Princeton to ride it to the Princeton Junction train station.
Resident Bryan Maher, of Penn Lyle Road, however, took issue with the Goldin report, saying, “I think it would be obscene, the amount of money we pay in taxes (for us) to help a private developer do anything,” he said. “I think this should be tax neutral to West Windsor residents, period.”
He also opposed building any sort of garage because “I don’t think we should be encouraging non-West Windsor or non-area residents to keep coming to this area. You can’t keep building parking garages to satisfy Princeton, Montgomery, and everybody else who keep flooding West Windsor with more traffic.”
Another resident compared building a new garage to the famous baseball saying “If you build it, they will come.” He said that more people would travel from outside the town to use the station, taking up all the parking. He said the infrastructure simply could not handle that kind of growth.
Exeter Court resident Dan Fabrizio, a 20-year resident and 18-year commuter, also said he wasn’t a fan of building a huge parking garage. “You only need to look at Hamilton to see the nightmare,” he said. “It may be efficient to stack them up and put cars on top of each other, but it’s very expensive.” Rather, the compost site would be perfect for another lot, or smaller parking garage like in Carnegie Center. “I’m a fan of the way it is,” he said. “It’s fine. It works for me. If you do build a garage, and it is costly, I hope it doesn’t affect the cost of everybody else who has a very economical permit. Spending between $150 and $165 a quarter, we love it. We appreciate that. Don’t change that on us because of a Taj Mahal garage that’s very expensive.”
Mark Shallcross, a member of the West Windsor Bicycle and Pedestrian Alliance, disagreed. He said he used to commute from the MetroPark station in Woodbridge, and that while “it is by no means Nirvana,” and has its traffic problems, “we’re not in Iowa in the middle of the cornfields here,” he said. “You have a multiyear wait for a parking permit, you’ve got a problem, and there isn’t enough land to do anything else in my opinion.”
One Princeton resident, Joshua Leinsdorf, emphasized he felt busing on Route 571 was the best option, and suggested the Parking Authority purposely created the shortage. “I feel that the shortage is engineered. It’s deliberate, “ he said. “You don’t have a bus shuttle or bench on the Wallace Road side of the station. You won’t allow us to have bus service because then the shortage allowing you to charge these high rates at the train station would disappear, and the taxpayers of West Windsor would be stuck having to pay the bonds. The answer that would pay for itself and even produce a profit is public transit to the train station.”
One Plainsboro resident, Laura Poyd, of Tennyson Drive, didn’t like the idea of satellite parking, saying that it would make it very hard for her, a single mother, to drop off her two children at their schools, and get to the train station to go to work.
“The bus (option) doesn’t work because how am I getting off the train and getting on a bus and picking up two kids — one in Plainsboro and one in West Windsor? The parking situation is so bad that by the time I get into work, I feel I already had a nervous breakdown. It almost takes me as long to get out of the parking lot as it does to go from Newark to Princeton Junction.”
She suggested the best option would be a parking garage. “Alexander Road is a commercial area with multistory buildings. To me a parking structure’s the only way to go so I can get to work, I can earn a living, I can pay the taxes that I pay, and I can just take care of my kids.”
According to Lupo, there are 7,”300 daily travelers using the train station. There are 3,”600 spaces, 2,”600 of which are accessible by permit. The remaining 1,”000 are daily, first-come, first-serve spots. Currently, there are 3,”900 permit holders who have access to those 2,”600 spaces. “We oversell knowing that people will not use their permits on a daily basis,” Lupo said.
About 40 percent of the permit holders have had their permits for 10 or more years, and under 20 percent have had them for less than a year. The parking authority issues about 400 to 500 permits each year, he said. There are about 8,”400 cars — or two per permit — currently registered with the authority, as it allows the permit holder to register as many cars as necessary to their residence.
Residents pay about $33 a month, while nonresidents pay $55, and daily lot users pay $80 a month, compared with the $100 monthly average for parking at the Hamilton train station, and between $100 and $220 a month rates at Trenton. “We have a good deal now, even with the recent rate increase, we’re still well under market value for a space,” Lupo said.
There are currently 5,”200 people on the permit waiting list, of which 47 percent, or roughly 2,”500, are West Windsor residents. Lupo said it’s hard to estimate how long the wait actually is, because it depends on how often someone turns in his or her permit to be recycled and given to someone new. “It could fluctuate. Obviously, we hope it’s a shorter, but realistically, people tend to hold onto it longer, and part of that is because of the price, and because they know getting it again is going to be very difficult.”
About 12 percent of the people on the waiting list are from Plainsboro, and 10 percent are from Princeton. About 45 percent of the permits the parking authority does issue go to West Windsor residents, while 13 percent go to Princeton and 10 percent go to Plainsboro residents, he said.
The Parking Authority is currently going through the waiting list and trying to identify as accurately as possible where those people reside in the township or in neighboring towns, he said. And in moving forward, the authority will have to take into account numerous factors, including population growth, highway traffic, and how crowded the trains are. “Our mission here is to make sure we know what our wait list is, what an accurate count is, so we can determine the right size of additional parking, whether it’s a garage, deck, whatever that structure would be,” he said. “We want to make sure we’re not overbuilding something.”
Lupo said the authority will also be looking at better traffic patterns and will come up with a plan where the facility should go. He referenced Goldin’s report, which stated $210 a month for permit holders would be necessary to finance a parking garage. “Some of the information leading to that number needs to be really tweaked, but that wasn’t our study,” he emphasized. “We would do our own study. We talked to other engineering firms already, we have some ideas, and that’s going to be the next stage for us in talking to council. But our plan is to not to bankrupt our residents by putting a parking garage up. That doesn’t help anybody.”
He did say, however, that permit holders would probably feel some rate increases. “There has to be some type of mark-up to help offset the structure at the train station.”
And he hinted that a parking garage seems to be the most efficient structure to build. “Surface parking, away from the fact that it’s ugly, takes up a lot of space, and you just don’t get the bang for the buck. Unfortunately, going up is the answer.”
He said the authority would work with NJ Transit, and with the council’s plans for redevelopment. “Our role, we feel, is central to the question of parking demand,” Lupo said. “We need to be involved in this process from the start.”
Councilman Charles Morgan noted that he was “very frustrated” with “the redevelopment process and how it got out to a poor start in that the Parking Authority seemed to be an afterthought, if not completely forgotten. This meeting is a sign that the entire council strongly supports the Parking Authority moving forward on parking. Redevelopment is kind of a simple-minded thing. You start with parking, and everything else flows from parking.”
He drew some applause when he said the problem was not just a West Windsor problem, but that of the region, and that “it’s not going to be fixed on the backs of West Windsor taxpayers, I can tell you that.”
Morgan seemed to support the idea of satellite parking, saying a parking garage should be located at the corner of the Amtrak train tracks and Quakerbridge Road with access to Route 1 and I-295. He also suggested a regional parking facility located in the Plainsboro area, and perhaps even a high-speed shuttle along the Amtrak right of way. He said it might be expensive, but he would lie to see Congressman Rush Holt get involved.
Councilwoman Linda Geevers echoed calling on county leaders and working with NJ Transit to help in the process. After the meeting, she said she supporting looking into satellite parking sites and that she would like to see consideration for a new Dinky Line stop on Alexander Road.
Council President Will Anklowitz said he didn’t support putting up a garage near Berrien City because it would blight that neighborhood. But he added, “Parking is the cornerstone of the redevelopment process. If you don’t have any parking, there’s no cars, there’s no people, there’s no anything. The Parking Authority will have to coordinate with the Planning Board to work out circulation patterns.”
After the meeting, Anklowitz said he thought Goldin’s report was interesting, but that it’s just one of the many different estimates for parking garages he’s seen. Most of those estimated lower costs, but some were higher than Goldin’s, he said. “They were at least willing to put their name on a document, a little bit different that what I’ve seen before.”
One fact that came out during the meeting was that on Saturdays and Sundays, West Windsor residents can park in the Wallace permit lot right across from Berrien City on the east side of the tracks without getting ticketed. The Parking Authority, which patrols the area for ticketing purposes, is able to scan the license plates to check if those residents are actually living in the township.
