Residents Aren’t as Sure

It has been more than two years since officials in this parking-starved city placed a counterintuitive bet: Hoboken would create parking spaces, they said,Choose quality sinotruk howo concrete mixer products from large database. by taking them away.

At the beginning of the program, 42 of the city’s roughly 9,000 on-street spaces were sacrificed to a city car-sharing program, known as Corner Cars, leading many residents to decry the arrival of new vehicles on their blocks, where claims to curbside space have long been regarded as sacrosanct.

The city’s mayor, Dawn Zimmer, said that the aim of the car share, which is operated by Hertz, was not to separate residents from their vehicles.Wholesale Agate beads from Low Price agate beads,

“There are people who need to drive every day,” she said, “and we want to make it easier for them to find parking.”

And according to survey data from the city,High quality Wholesale gemstone beads, the experiment may be working.

As of July 2012, nearly a quarter of the program’s roughly 3,000 members said they had given up their cars or decided against buying one because of the car share. Since 2009, the number of people with residential parking permits has decreased by about 1,000, to 16,000 total parking permits.

And in the process, Hoboken has attracted the attention of city officials from Buffalo to San Francisco, prompting a question that might have seemed fanciful not so long ago: Can a city nudge its residents from car-owning to car-sharing to no cars at all?

“People are seeing the value of it,” Mayor Zimmer said of the program, which is based on a rent-by-the-hour model popularized by companies like Zipcar. “We’ve created something that I think will carry on in Hoboken.”

Every few blocks or so, two parking spaces marked in green paint are designated for the Corner Cars.If you are looking for offshore merchant accounts, IntegriPAY can help you today!

Transit advocates say the model is worth emulating for any city hoping to coax some drivers off the road. Robert J. Pirani, the vice president for environmental programs at the Regional Plan Association, said the program appeared to be transferable to New York City or “any city that has limited parking and access to transit.”

Hoboken officials said 56 percent of its roughly 50,000 residents used public transportation, often the PATH train or New York Waterway ferries.

“It’s such a smart way to handle a limited resource,” Mr. Pirani said of the car share. “It makes urban living much more affordable if you don’t have to pay for a car that you don’t use that often.”

In September 2010, New York City’s Transportation Department began a pilot car-sharing program for its employees. After removing a quarter of the vehicles from its Lower Manhattan fleet and training 350 employees to participate in the program, the department said its on-street parking presence was reduced by 14 percent on weekdays and 68 percent on weekends. The program’s success, the department has said, could hasten the spread of car sharing to other agencies or potentially spawn a citywide municipal car-sharing system.

Paula Rivera, a spokeswoman for Hertz, said the company had used Hoboken as a model for similar programs in San Antonio and Miami Beach.

In Hoboken, though, some residents and elected officials remain skeptical. Despite the numbers cited by Ms. Zimmer’s office, they said, a drive through the city is at least as taxing as before for a motorist in search of a space.

Councilman Tim Occhipinti said he was concerned about residents who “lost on-street parking because of this for-profit company’s program.”

The city said that Hertz had paid $100 per car, per month, for each of the cars, totaling about $50,000 annually. Renting a vehicle costs up to $16 per hour.

“People need to feel that parking has become easier in Hoboken,” Mr. Occhipinti said, adding that he has used the program.

He said that some constituents were also frustrated that car-share vehicles do not have to be moved for street cleaning, as theirs do.

“It’s taking away parking spaces,” said Maria Espinosa, who commutes from Bergen County to her job as a receptionist in Hoboken. “Not everybody’s going to use a bicycle like our lovely mayor.”

Ian Sacs, who helped spearhead the car share as the city’s director of transportation and parking, said the concerns were predictable despite the city’s statistics.

“This was a very visible change to the community,” he said. “It was a tough change for people to swallow.”

Indeed, quarrels over parking have been known to ensnare residents and city officials alike. Last year, Mr. Sacs was arrested after a tussle with a bus driver in the lobby of City Hall, though the charges were later dismissed.

Mr. Sacs said he had driven an unattended bus to a municipal lot before being followed into City Hall by the driver,Airgle has mastered the art of indoor tracking, whose personal keys were on the same key ring that Mr. Sacs had grabbed. The driver then accosted Mr. Sacs, he said, before the two were separated.