Hoboken: Wonderful and Walkable

Hoboken is a city where the best way to get anywhere is to walk there, and that is a good thing. A couple weekends ago, the hottest weekend of the year, my wife and I walked easily from down by the PATH up to the Shipyard for the garden tour and out by the light rail. Having read Jeff Speck’s Walkable City (2012) and I think he would approve of Hoboken.

 

Speck, an expert on sustainable design, advocates walkable cities, like Hoboken, as the future of urban areas. He argues that a walkable city is energy efficient, better for health, creates a sense of community and that it creates efficiencies for business, a better attraction than zero-sum game of tax breaks.  City Hall, seems to be ahead of the curve here, Hoboken even gets a positive mention (pg. 172).  We have a number of elements that Speck says cultivate a walkable city: car sharing, bike lanes, and a good number of trees (though more wouldn’t hurt) According to walkscore.com, we are a “Walker’s Paradise” http://www.walkscore.com/score/07030

We still could do better, in some areas. our streets are often more like clogged arteries and parking is still a nightmare.  Our vibrant downtown doesn’t extend to the west side of town. We have blocks where walking is simply uncomfortable, baking sidewalks under open stretches of blank walled buildings, surface parking lots, and buildings isolated from street life.  Most would agree that these reduce the health of our city.

According to Speck, we can handicap our city by not understanding the problems correctly.  One type of misunderstanding  he comes back to repeatedly is ignorance of induced demand.

Just one example, when we look at parking problems the instinct is to build more parking.. Not only is this not cheap ( building a surface parking spot costs $5000 and a parking deck spot several times that) but it can be the wrong solution.  New parking spaces can lead people to purchase cars now that there is parking space. Demand for cars is induced and the parking situation does not improve.  In a dense city more parking also means taking space that could be used for businesses, stores, and residences, literally sapping the vitality of a city.

Often a better solution is to focus on making existing parking more efficient. Hoboken has already taken steps along these lines, like reduced rates for local business employees, freeing up commercial street spots for customers. Muni-meters give Hoboken the potential to change rates with time of day to ensure consistently full, though not overfull, parking.

Not everything in Walkable City applies to Hoboken but its worth a read for anyone concerned about the future of our city. There are ideas on how to compete for businesses on efficiency and make the most of our existing advantages. Hopefully our elected officials are reading books like this if only to have informed decision why they disagree.  I was very pleased to see Councilman Mello, Chair of the Parking and Transportation Committee, posting links about designing healthy communities, hopefully others are following his lead.