Our editor’s statistics showing that the percentage of these projects that have failed are indeed a concern. After a little more research, I am now asking what is the relevance to Hackensack?
Professional planning studies would have to be made supporting a pedestrian street initiative in Hackensack, and there is little harm in investigating it. Simply dismissing it or blindly supporting it is not a good thing. Something like this needs to be be studied.
Here’s some possible reasons why pedestrian streets built in the 1970’s failed in some downtowns:
(1) They were built during an era of middle-class flight out of cities. (We are not in such an era now, cities everywhere are rebuilding and improving)
(2) They were built in or very near a high-crime neighborhood. This was the case in Trenton (This is not relevant to Hackensack)
(3) The remaining street pattern had a seriously disrupted traffic flow. In fact, our editor stressed this in his post (this won’t be the case in Hackensack with Moore Street becoming one-way north and completely absorbing all the northbound flow on Main Street from the Green to the Library)
(4) Inadequate connections from the downtown to the regional highway network (We have good connections, River Street and Hackensack Ave provide this)
(5) No Business Improvement District (BID) to manage and oversee everything. BID’s are a relatively new concept (One of the links the editor provided stressed this. Hackensack has a BID)
(6) Inadequate provisions for nearby parking, no parking towers. Or parking facilities with parking meters that have a maximum time of only one hour. (This definately must be addressed. We need parking towers. In fact, Hackensack’s change from two-hour to one-hour meters in the 1990’s was a disaster, and it drove many stores out of business)
(7) No major pedestrian base in the form of colleges, office buildings, and/or surrounding neighborhood (Hackensack has a huge office base, a growing residential base, with lesser contributions from Bergen County Community College and even the Parisian Hair academy). If the city builds a new city hall with a library on Essex Street, the plan is to convert the Johnson Library into a large cultural arts center. This will bring even more pedestrians into the downtown, especially in the evening hours.
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Inadequate population density in the surrounding area. (I seem to recall a planning study documenting half a million population within a 5 mile radius of downtown Hackensack)
(9) Inadequate streetscape improvements. Some cities just blocked off the streets and expected pedestrians to walk on the asphalt. In many cases, there were inadequate attempts to create an “atmosphere” with lighting, special paving, trees, flowers, etc.
(10) Lack of investment from the private sector. This is related to issue #1 on this list.
(11) Inadequate mass transit. Our editor didn’t mention this, but I understand that this was a very big factor in some of the failed projects. Hackensack does have a lot of bus lines coming into the downtown. It would be nice to see rail reconnected.
Clearly, there has been a movement in the direction of pedestrian-friendly downtowns and “new urbanism” planning, especially in the last 5 years. The articles that our editor linked to indicate that a lot of the pedestrian-only downtown streets were built in the 1970’s, and failed. One actually mentioned that having a Business Improvement District is essentially to such a project succeeding. Cities in general were failing in the 1970’s. There was a lot of disinvestment and middle-class flight.
Now it is 2006, and cities are the center of investment once again. Demographics in Hackensack have also changed in favor of this concept. We now have a great diversity of immigrant people in Hackensack, almost all from countries that place less emphasis on the automobile. Contrary to the assumptions of most white people, statistics show that this demographic change has occurred WITHOUT a reduction in education level or per capita income, after adjusting to inflation. In fact, both have risen.
I do not believe that a pedestrian street project would have succeeded in 1970’s Hackensack. Now is a different story. This concept is something that needs to be studied, not dismissed because it was done improperly in other cities, or done during the wrong era.
Issues such as deliveries and garbage pickup can be addressed in the same manner as other pedestrian downtowns, usually during very early morning hours.
Although Hackensack has taken the mighty step in establishing a Business Improvement District, there has been no collective vision. Instead, the guiding vision remains the same --- each individual merchant expects to magically entice customers, simply on the merits of their own products or services, to drive to downtown Hackensack from suburbia, park on Main Street within a ½ block of the store, and walk in the front door.
We’ve been struggling with this failed business plan for 50 years. It hasn’t worked since the first mall opened in Paramus, and from that point forwards it will never work. IT’S TIME TO TRASH THAT BUSINESS PLAN IN IT’S ENTIRETY AND MOVE IN ANOTHER DIRECTION
People are going to patronize stores and restaurants in Hackensack for two primary reasons:
(1) THEY ARE ALREADY THERE because
a. they live there (in a new multi-unit building)
b. they work there (in an office),
c. they are visiting an office for business purposes
d. they are visiting a library, a future cultural arts center, or a health club such as the YMCA
(2) they are traveling to downtown Hackensack specifically to enjoy the atmosphere of an improved pedestrian downtown street.
Right now, relatively few people are driving into downtown specifically to visit stores and restaurants. Despite our editor’s fear that Hackensack doesn’t have a “pedestrian base” to support the pedestrian street concept, our existing retail and restaurant establishments are already almost totally reliant upon the pedestrian base. Most of their customers are the already there because they work in nearby offices. That’s why everything shuts down after 5:00 PM. Now, if we make a really nice pedestrian street, three things will happen (1) an even higher percent of the office workers will patronize Main Street, (2) much more people will walk in from the surrounding high-density residential neighborhoods, and (3) we can actually achieve the “holy grail” of downtown planning, which is getting people from suburbia to drive in, park in parking towers, and enjoy the pedestrian street atmosphere.
Now comes the tough part, convincing the majority of merchants to give this some serious thought, so that we can get some professional planning studies of this concept.