The APA New Jersey Community Planning Assistance Program (CPAP) and the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority are partnering on a new round of Transit Hub Planning Projects.
Please contact Tom Schulze at tomschulze@aol.com, or 973-634-1697 to volunteer, get more information or ask any questions.
Project #1: City of Passaic Transit Hub
Passaic’s Main Avenue is the center of the city’s very active central commercial and retail district. Within thedistrict are approximately 500 businesses, consisting primarily of small retail shops such as variety stores,bodegas, beauty and nail salons, restaurants, and travel agencies. Larger retail shops (athletic apparel,clothing, 99 cent stores, etc.) are also scattered throughout, as well as professional health and service providers. The area benefits from a supportive community, a youthful and growing workforce, low crime rate,and a strong commercial and residential real estate market. It also has strong potential for growth in the areas of ethnic goods, services and restaurants.
The city has been working for years to help realize this growth potential, with several major and complementary new projects ready to advance that will change the way the area will function. Central to these efforts is a soon-to-be-constructed $6 million NJ TRANSIT bus terminal on Main Avenue at Passaic Street and Passaic Avenue at the southern end of the commercial and retail district. Passaic County is advancing a $40 million project to upgrade Main Avenue, including new traffic patterns and lane configurations, bump outs and a roundabout adjacent to the new bus terminal. This new streetscape project will radically change the nature of Main Avenue, reducing the large parking areas in the center of the street to create pedestrian plazas and safer pedestrian crossings at intersections along Main Avenue. The city is also advancing a new parking garage at State Street and Passaic Street, one block east of Main Avenue. The garage, which is fully funded, will costs $12 million and will accommodate the growing need for parking in the district and the loss of about 60 spaces due to the new streetscaping project. Finally, based on a previous pilot initiative by this program in 2017, the city has changed the zoning in the district to encourage adding floors above ground-level retail to add more residential uses on the upper floors.
The goal of this transit hub project is to create strategies to ensure that the area functions safely and efficiently when all these new major projects come together. Those strategies and the underlying data would be included in a Transit Village Application. While the new terminal will be used only by NJ TRANSIT bus services, the city is looking for ways to create a multi-modal facility that will improve access to and from the Main Avenue from throughout the area. The terminal should complement a new shuttle service being proposed by the city. The service would run from the terminal to the two nearby NJ TRANSIT train stations, the Passaic Station, and the Delawanna Station in Clifton. The city plans to use UEZ revenues to support the operations of the new shuttle. The team could evaluate the potential of this type of service and explore the use of micro-mobility at the terminal.
With so many big projects being planned the Transit Hub project will help to ensure that they all work well together to encourage growth, vitality and a safe pedestrian environment along Main Avenue and attract more people and activity to the area. The diagram below is an overview of the area and identifies locations of these new projects. The city is looking to have the team of volunteer planners review the current plans for the major projects and develop a plan that will ensure they all work together.
APA New Jersey and NJTPA are looking to form a multi-disciplinary team of volunteer planners to undertake this work for the City of Passaic with some or all the following skills:
- Public space planning,
- Pedestrian improvements,
- Community redevelopment,
- Transportation and micro-mobility,
- Traffic engineering / circulation,
- Parking management,
- Economic development, and
- Community outreach.
Project #2: City of Perth AmboyTransit Hub
Built in 1928 on today’s NJ TRANSIT North Jersey Coastline, the station is in the center of Perth Amboy’s very busy commercial district on Smith Street. With travel times of about 59 minutes to NY Penn Station and 37 minutes to Newark Penn Station, daily weekday ridership was just under 1000 passengers before reductions during the pandemic. There are almost 150 spaces in a municipal-owned parking lot adjacent to the station (see 1 on the map below). The area is also served by several bus lines that pass by the station including the 116, 813 and 815, which should become an important part of the area’s intermodal function.
The station area is located near an active commercial center with walkable streets, residential communities and unique cultural businesses and activities, but lacks a distinctive sense of place and dynamic vitality needed to attract more businesses, residents, and visitors. Although the city developed a series of improvement plans for the area beginning in 2013, changes in leadership, lackluster economic conditions, and NJ TRANSIT’s ambitious enhancement of the station itself hindered their implementation. The city is now ready to energetically take up these earlier plans described below, reintroduce them to the city’s stakeholders and build a strategy for implementing the best ideas.
- The Perth Amboy Bay City Transit District Strategy creates a new vision for Downtown Perth Amboy, oriented around transit. The plan includes ideas for redeveloping the train station, reusing upper levels of old commercial buildings to develop more residential housing, capitalizing on the downtown’s existing Latino niche market and food offerings, and rezoning downtown to encourage mixed use development. The plan is built around a number of key places including a new “Station Green” and a revitalized five points intersection, which will anchor the downtown’s main commercial corridor along Smith Street. The report can be found at this lick to the Together North Jersey website. http://development.togethernorthjersey.com/Development/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/20140603_Final-Report_Perth-Amboy-com.pdf
- The Smith Street Central Business District Study developed a vision for the Gateway area in Perth Amboy centered on interesting eclectic markets combined with art and cultural events that attract visitors. To achieve this vision, the plan lays out several strategies including traffic calming measures, better regulated parking, better connections to the waterfront and potential redevelopment projects. The Gateway area would be directly connected to a redeveloped “transition” area which in turn would connect to a revamped station area with improved pedestrian walkways, streetscaping, green public space and zoning that promotes the use of transit. The plan can be found at the following link to the Together North Jersey website. http://development.togethernorthjersey.com/Development/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/NGO-MicroGrant_JRF-REPORT_10142014.pdf
- Creative Perth Amboy is a plan developed in 2015 by a consortium including Rutgers University, Leonardo Vazquez, Denisse Ortiz, The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking Leigh Anne Hindenlang, the City of Perth Amboy Perth Amboy, and Creative Team Perth Amboy Arts Council to enhance the quality of life in Perth Amboy and to empower economic development through arts and culture. This plan can be found at the following link. https://cdn5-hosted.civiclive.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_11204924/File/Departments/OECD/Creative%20Placemaking%20Plan.pdf
- The City’s Circulation Element of the Master Plan from 2016 contains the city’s adopted bicycle and pedestrian routes throughout the city. This can be found at the following link. https://cdn5-hosted.civiclive.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_11204924/Image/Departments/OECD/PA%20Circulation%20Element%20Final.pdf
The city is looking to form a team of volunteer planners review the reports above, assess the viability of the recommendations and develop a transit hub strategic plan for advancing the best ideas. A rigorous outreach program, which could include bi-lingual materials, an online survey, focus groups and virtual meetings would be part of the work of the team. In addition to assessing the feasibility of an entertainment center created around the city ‘s many restaurants, improvements the city would like to explore include better wayfinding, a more diversified mix of businesses and a greatly improved public realm at the station and the surrounding areas. The study’s results should be realistic and implementable, possibly stratified by easier-to-achieve recommendations for early successes vs. more complex improvements requiring longer lead times.
APA New Jersey and NJTPA are looking to form a multi-disciplinary team of volunteer planners to undertake this work for Perth Amboy that will include the following skills:
- Cultural placemaking,
- Public space planning,
- Pedestrian improvements,
- Community redevelopment,
- Housing / Fair Share Policy,
- Transportation and micro-mobility,
- Traffic engineering / circulation,
- Zoning,
- Parking management,
- Economic development, and
- Community outreach.