Parking Woes Abound For NJ Transit Riders

In 2005, one of my first postings on transit issues raised the issue of parking. It noted that NJ Transit built parking facilities that remain underutilized while towns and municipalities that need parking options were ignored.

Little has changed since then. Parking remains a problem. NJ Transit can claim that they've added more than 5,000 parking spots, but are they where people will actually use them?

The parking lot should be one of the easier stops on the crowded and occasionally stressful journey to work. But at some North Jersey train stations and bus stops, mass-transit customers are confronting a dearth of parking, despite NJ Transit's addition of 5,625 new spaces over the past five years.

The agency announced its latest addition this month, when it approved spending $4 million to create 143 new spaces at the North Hackensack station. But the pinch remains in towns such as Fair Lawn, where the number of permits issued by the borough far exceeds the amount of parking spaces.

Dave Fantau recently switched to the Radburn station because it was closer to his home in Wayne. But the only spaces he could find at 7:10 a.m. were too far from the station.

"[Borough officials] said they would give me a non-resident permit for something like $95 for the rest of the year," said Fantau, a national sales manager for a packaging company. "I sat there picturing myself in the snow or rain, being drenched by the time I got to the train."

He decided to pay a nearby gas station $125 a month to use its lot instead.

"If I was going to move right now, I would be looking at where is it commuter-advantageous," Fantau said. "I am obsessed with this and look at it all the time."

The shortage at some popular stations, such as Radburn, is compounded by the fact that NJ Transit does not own many of the lots, and cannot manage the way they are used.

Instead an assortment of towns apply their own policies, which aren't necessarily geared toward encouraging mass transit. The rules generally prohibit parking on streets near the stations and often reserve lots for local residents.

Similar restrictions have sprung up in towns where most commuters use the bus.

Last fall in Tenafly, the council approved a ban that prohibited parking on Engle Street, a thoroughfare that is popular with bus commuters. Borough officials sought to restrict parking, but several commuters objected to the ban.

Towns don't want the additional traffic or spots taken up by commuters in downtown business areas, so they impose parking restrictions that limit parking to 2 hours or no parking from 8am to 10am or other similar deterrents to commuter parking.

Options to build new parking decks or new lots meet opposition from towns as well. If all these folks are serious about mass transit and getting people out of their cars, they have to address the parking issue at the train stations or else these people will continue driving into the City.