Contributor Blog

Working for a small municipality - regardless of its location - has all the isolating properties of a far-away fiefdom.  So it has been with great consternation that, despite being nary a narrow river's width from that island, I have been yet so far removed from the industry-insider privileges of working on transportation projects in Manhattan.  I am, admittedly, all but entirely absorbed by work in the New York City satellite of Hoboken, NJ, and while aware of progress as reported by the media, have nonetheless lost granular touch with the revolutionary day-to-day goings-on in my career's former epicenter.  From this side of the Hudson I read the broad

While it is still in the early stages, it's nonetheless exciting to post that Hoboken and Jersey City are collaborating with Hudson County Transportation Management Association (TMA) to explore ways to bring a full-fledged bike sharing program to the west coast of the Hudson.  The full details are posted in a Request for Expressions of Interest (RFEOI) here:

http://www.hudsontma.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=227&cat_id=21&Itemid=61 

We're doing a lot of fun, progressive stuff in Hoboken, NJ, and what we do here helps our industry push the envelope for the whole country.  But limited budgets and ever-critical politics make it incredibly difficult to keep the momentum on current and new projects with our limited staff.  Last year we created a new Department of Transportation and Parking, but we have been strapped from hiring on requisite professionals to manage all projects because, well, we don't have the money.  If you are a planning/engineering student seeking real-world experience to counterbalance academic theory, or if you are currently employed but looking for an outlet to independently exercise your creativity, I need your help in Hoboken, no matter where you live.

This week, Hoboken is announcing its version of a highly successful awareness campaign practiced throughout Europe and, more directly translatable, the UK. In the UK, the campaign is called “20's Plenty for Us”, and in cities that adopt this policy, a 20mph speed limit area is established and signs are posted requiring drivers to obey the lower speed limit.

Ostensibly, the actions today by NJ Governor Chris Christie to cancel the "Access to Region's Core" (ARC) tunnel project seem like a vicious blow to the future of rail in our country (fatal even, given the recent commentary from conservatives country-wide on opposition to the national high speed rail network projects).  I myself am extremely disappointed that our state's fiscal circumstances have led the Governor to make this decision, and I am sincerely empathetic to the construction and operational jobs and potential to improve mobility conditions that this cancellation jeopardizes.

Over the past year, we've been guiding the City of Hoboken, NJ towards providing sufficient alternative modes of transportation such that owning a car for a large number of residents becomes more than unattractive, it's simply not necessary.  The goal is not to tell residents that they can't own a car, but to make life without a car so easy that every single family in Hoboken can freely choose whether owning a car is what they want to spend their money on.  For those who decide that a daily commute by car is most practical, my job is to make it possible to find a parking space and travel in and out of town without too much friction.  However, for the overwhelming majority of Hobokenites who commute daily on foot, bicycle, or via transit, life without a car should be as

As young planners bursting into the real world we are anxious to create communities that are vibrant, fun, and speak to the urbanity that will host future generations of our civilization.  What we lack in experience we make up for in enthusiasm, and hope that our superiors guide us on the finer points of less crystallized aspects of critical infrastructure such as designing for the elderly, disabled, and those semi-attached to a stroller.  In traffic engineering, we often hear a common rebuttal to technical traffic analysis from communities; they say, “I drive these streets every day, so I understand traffic here better than you.”  Well, they’re right.

On a day we remember how hate can be manifest into reckless slaughter, perhaps we can find a moment to also remind ourselves that the provision of mobility as a basic tenet of urban planning is one small but nonetheless fundamental way we can strengthen the brotherly ties between neighbors, nations, cultures, humanity. ~ian

 

I frequently drive to an uncle’s house near the beach via the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey.  For years, that drive required a very late Friday evening departure and a similarly late Sunday evening return trip to avoid the wicked stop-and-go that always mires t

There's a lot of babbling on in this blog about how streets are public space, that they are for people, and that they should be designed equitably for everyone.

Just because our media-ravenous culture inundates us with more news than we can stomach doesn't mean we should give up on the long term prospects of the BP catastrophe.  As the poorly secured well beneath the exploded BP rig Deepwater Horizon continues its high-pressure torrent of not-yet-quantified-but-something-in-the-order-of-tens-to-hundreds-of-thousand-of-gallons-per-day of oil into the gorgeous waters of the Gulf of Mexico, we must not let the drone of time allow us lose sight of the result of horrendous and unforgivable destruction, weak industrial controls, and even weaker environmental morals.  We must also not ignore that efforts to “contain” the spill were devised simultaneously with an effort to spare the well.

The parking “epidemic” in Hoboken is so bad that no parking garage conceivable by man can contain our demand.  So this week, Hoboken ventures where no city has gone before; we are rolling out the nation’s first city-wide on-street car-sharing program as a public-private partnership between Hoboken and Connect by Hertz.

 

With the brilliant help of graduates from Hoboken's Stevens Institute of Technology, our local community shuttle bus (a.k.a. The Hop, formerly known as The Downtown Crosstown Shuttle) can now be viewed live on the city's website as it cruises along narrow Hoboken city streets from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM (EST), Monday through Friday.  If you're not near the internet, try texting “crosstown” to 41411 to get a return text with the location of the bus' whereabouts whenever it's running, then run down to the corner before you miss it!

When I inherited the Hoboken Parking Utility last year, it was hobbling along with all of the forward planning of a Friday night Rock-and-Bowl last call.  With no time to build a new budget from the bottom up, I was left to remold what I found into something a little less status-quo and a little more innovative.  In a scrutinizing political climate and tough economic conditions, the changes had to be both necessary and serve as an example of ways to reduce costs.

The beauty of street paint is that it costs next to nothing and it can have a huge effect in a very short period of time.  Anyone watching how New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan transforms public streets into public spaces with paint, planters, seating, and signs knows how the installation of these materials overnight works like magic.

As a young kid, skirting aimlessly throughout my suburban municipality from one car-optimized shopping center to the next on my bicycle in search of stimulation (and perhaps trouble), I vividly recall - though I likely didn't describe it as - the internal conflict between interesting commercial destinations on the inside, and the banal, cruel approach to these places on the outside.  Although the primitive human desires of my psyche subconsciously longed for a central place to congregate with other lost children of the suburbs, I never had a downtown; I never had a community center.  In this vacuum, I compensated with all that was available.

As if all this inclement weather hasn't been hassle enough for those of us who cherish our cars, I practically careened into another tragic loss for the rightfully auto-minded recently in Hoboken, New Jersey.  It seems the needs of lofty pedestrians et.al. have once again been imprudently prioritized over us drivers in a result that is sure to make your muffler ratlle: a one-block segment of an historic belgian block street has been closed off to the ideal form of personal mobility (read: car) so that silly people with nothing better to do than run around frivolously in streets have another place off the sidewalk to inconvenience the driving majority of our great nation.

Very snowy holiday greetings from Finland, everyone!  While here visiting my in-laws and friends, I wanted to take a quick moment and share an interesting observation about the way Finns handle the incessant layers of snow that blanket their chilly winter country.  It seems that aside from limited access highways and some primary arterials, the Finnish standard for snow treatment is to plow to a reasonable depth, but not worry too much about an inch or two of snow base layer covering streets.  Some streets get sand treatment as well, but salt is used very, very sparingly.

New Jersey's prized gateway communities along Long Beach Island - South Jersey's extra-special vacation spot better known to the planning community for its prescient example as human habitation threatened by natural erosion in Ian McHarg's planning tome “Design with Nature” - are facing an entirely man-made threat in the form of ill-conceived plans to effectively double the roadway “capacity” of the one and only bridge connecting this 18 mile barrier island to the mainland.  If NJDOT is left to its own devices, and local community officials rush them along, a proposed new bridge will have the complete opposi

So, I'm out at a site visit with the city engineer last week and we're talking about ways to implement curb extensions to reduce pedestrian exposure to vehicular traffic.  We're discussing inexpensive ways to accomplish this, and then on queue, as is the right and obligation of all civil engineers, the ugly villain subject of all things bumped-out rears its head: drainage.