New York Observer

“PATH/Fail: The Story of the World’s Most Expensive Train Station

By Stephen Jacob Smith. May 14, 2013

The Port Authority used to set records in good ways. The George Washington Bridge was a marvel of engineering in its day, the world’s longest bridge when it was built, and still the busiest. The Port Authority Bus Terminal, opened in 1950, is to this day the largest on earth by passenger volume.

But today, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey doesn’t brag about the records it sets. One World Trade Center, born the Freedom Tower and taken over by the Port in 2006, will be the most expensive office building in the world. The “Vehicle Security Center,” an underground tour bus garage and road network serving the World Trade Center complex, may very well be the most expensive parking garage in history.”

The New York Times: 

“Rebuilding the Coastline, but at What Cost?

By Jenny Anderson. May 18, 2013

When a handful of retired homeowners from Osborn Island in New Jersey gathered last m“I said, look people, you built on a marsh island, it’s oxidizing under your feet — it’s shrinking — and that exacerbates the sea level rise,” said Dr. Hales, director of the Barnegat Bay Partnership, an estuary program financed by the Environmental Protection Agency. “Do you really want to throw good money after bad?”

Their answer? Yes”

Photo: Richard Perry/The New York Times

A public park redesign proposal that I and my colleagues at Mass Urban have been assisting Jersey City-based RTNA (Redstone Townhomes Neighborhood Association) with in collaboration with 3x3 Design, a partner organization, has begun coming to life!

NJ.com:

“Jersey City park blooms with help from neighborhood volunteers

Rafal Ragoza/ The Jersey Journal.  April 27, 2013 

  The Atlantic Cities: 

“The Sorry State of the New York-New Jersey Public Transit Connection

Eric Jaffe. April 10, 2012

A few days ago, New York City released a report showing the feasibility of a plan to extend the subway system across the Hudson River and into New Jersey [PDF]. The proposal — which would connect a new 7 train station in Manhattan with a rail terminal in Secaucus — would carry 128,000 riders a day. Mayor Bloomberg called the plan a “promising potential solution” to a “serious and urgent” problem.

No sooner did that call go out than the MTA, the city’s subway authority, put a serious damper on this solution’s potential, saying the project was not “an economically viable idea.”

So it’s been with New York-New Jersey transit plans in recent years. The importance of such a project to the New York metro area is painfully clear. Though the transit corridor is operating near capacity, estimates suggest travel demand between the two states will increase 38 percent by 2030. Meanwhile the two single-track tunnels currently running under the Hudson into Penn Station are a hundred years old.”

Image: G.A.O. 

The New York Times: 

“Lifting a Town to Escape the Next Flood 

Peter Applebome. Feb 22, 2013

HIGHLANDS, N.J. — If not for the most deadly natural disaster in American history, in Texas, and an innovative response to it, more than a century ago, one might briskly consign the proposal to save this oft-flooded borough at the northern end of the Jersey Shore to the realm of pigs with wings.

But four months after Hurricane Sandy almost obliterated downtown Highlands, an unlikely idea with one enormous historical antecedent seems to be taking hold here: Don’t just raise the buildings. Raise the town.

After all, officials in the modest, largely working-class community note, something quite similar was done, with the most rudimentary technologies, to save Galveston, Tex., which was raised as much as 17 feet after more than 6,000 people perished in the great hurricane of 1900. Yes, even the proponents here concede, it will be a long shot to persuade the federal government to spend more than $25 million to raise Highlands’s downtown 10 feet as a permanent solution to flooding, storm damage and rising seas.”

Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

NPR: 

After Sandy, Not All Sand Dunes Are Created Equal

By Adam Cole. Feb 13, 2013

When Superstorm Sandy hit Island Beach State Park — one of the last remnants of New Jersey’s barrier island ecosystem — it flattened the dunes, pushing all that sand hundreds of feet inland.

Three months later, the park was still officially closed, but the beach swarmed with volunteers. Members of the local Beach Buggy Association, volunteers from inland New Jersey, and a chilly but enthusiastic group of high school students dragged hundreds of old Christmas trees across the sand and laid them in a snaking line along the beach.

It seems like a bizarre strategy, but it’s an effective one. The trees’ needles and branches will trap windborne sand and serve as a foundation for new dunes.

Katie Barnett, a specialist with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, was the project’s mastermind. After Sandy, she put out a call for Christmas trees on the park service’s Facebook page. The trees came pouring in from all over the state.”

Photo: Alexandra Jones-Twaddell and Malley Chertkov add a Christmas tree to the growing line in Island Beach State Park. The two high-schoolers joined fellow students from the Peddie School to help rebuild dunes that had been flattened by Superstorm Sandy.

Adam Cole/NPR

The Atlantic Cities: 

“Hoboken Could Be a Model for Dealing With Urban Flooding

SARAH GOODYEAR FEB 13, 2013

Hoboken is a charming, compact little city on the banks of the Hudson River, with a walkable downtown and excellent public transit connections to New York City, as well as other communities in New Jersey. Its streets are lined with trees and brownstones, and it has transformed over the last 20 years from a fading industrial backwater to a flourishing residential community, gaining nearly 30 percent in population between 2000 and 2010.

Gentrification and the rising cost of living were, in fact, one of the more troublesome issues facing this city of 50,000 — until Superstorm Sandy hit. Then the rising waters suddenly became everyone’s primary concern. Flooding filled the city “like a bathtub,” mayor Dawn Zimmer said in the midst of the crisis. Tens of thousands were left stranded without power in the storm’s aftermath, and the streets were filled with contaminated water. It took weeks, in some cases even months, for transit connections to be restored.

Hoboken’s geographic position made it unusually vulnerable to Sandy’s effects. The land occupied by the city was once an island in the tidal waters where the Hudson opens up to what is now New York Harbor. Much of its two-square-mile area lies at or below sea level. Water came at the city from several directions, and there was nowhere for it to go once it had poured in.”

Photo: Reuters

The New York Times:

“Revival Is Planned for a Derelict Downtown Newark Park

By LISA W. FODERARO. Published: February 5, 2013

NEWARK — During a recent tour of Military Park on a frigid afternoon here, Daniel A. Biederman waved his arm at the derelict plaza before him, with its once-proud statuary gazing out at ailing trees and graffiti-covered garbage bins.

“This could be the Bryant Park of Newark, but nobody uses it,” said Mr. Biederman, the urban parks expert who two decades ago transformed that park in Midtown Manhattan from a forbidding drug haven to a jewel-box refuge. “If it was a gorgeous day in June, you’d still have six or eight people here.”

But with the city in the midst of a building boom, Military Park is poised for its own makeover. This spring, ground will be broken on a $3.25 million renovation overseen by Mr. Biederman and his firm, Biederman Redevelopment Ventures.”

Photo:A statue of John F. Kennedy is one of the features of Military Park in Newark, which will undergo a $3.25 million renovation.. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

“NYTimes: 

Costs of Shoring Up Coastal Communities.

By CORNELIA DEAN. Nov 5, 2012

For more than a century, for good or ill, New Jersey has led the nation in coastal development. Many of the barrier islands along its coast have long been lined by rock jetties, concrete sea walls or other protective armor. Most of its coastal communities have beaches only because engineers periodically replenish them with sand pumped from offshore.

Now much of that sand is gone. Though reports are still preliminary, coastal researchers say that when Hurricane Sandy came ashore, it washed enormous quantities of sand off beaches and into the streets — or even all the way across barrier islands into the bays behind them.

But even as these towns clamor for sand, scientists are warning that rising seas will make maintaining artificial beaches prohibitively expensive or simply impossible. Even some advocates of artificial beach nourishment now urge new approaches to the issue, especially in New Jersey.

The practice has long been controversial.

Opponents of beach nourishment argue that undeveloped beaches deal well with storms. Their sands shift; barrier islands may even migrate toward the mainland. But the beach itself survives, because buildings and roads do not pin it down.

By contrast, replenishment projects often wash away far sooner than expected. The critics say the best answer to coastal storms is to move people and buildings away from the water, a tactic some call strategic retreat.

Supporters of these projects counter that beaches are infrastructure — just like roads, bridges and sewer systems — that must be maintained. They say beaches attract tourists and summer residents, conferring immense economic benefits that more than outweigh the costs of the projects. Also, they argue, these beaches absorb storm energy, sparing buildings inland.

New Jersey has embraced this approach with gusto.Stewart C. Farrell, a professor of marine geology at Stockton College of New Jersey, said that since 1985 80 million cubic yards of sand had been applied on 54 of the state’s 97 miles of developed coastline: a truckload of sand for every foot of beach.”

Photo:  AT SEA: A roller coaster mangled by Hurricane Sandy in Seaside Heights, N.J. The state has embraced the practice of beach nourishment: bringing in sand to build up coastlines and barrier islands. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

“Transit villages in N.J. blend past with future, and spark development

By Mike Frassinelli/The Star-Ledger . Sept 22, 2012

New Jersey Transportation Commissioner Jim Simpson surveyed the old railroad town that was trying to revitalize its main street.

He looked at the renovated movie theater that attracts scores of families and at the refurbished building that serves as a practice center for Olympians on the U.S. table tennis team.

Simpson looked at Dunellen and saw the past — and the future.

“This is like old wine in a new bottle — all of the ingredients for success are here,” he said last month at a ceremony to name the Middlesex County borough the state’s 26th Transit Village, communities built around transportation hubs, making it convenient to get around without a car.

A report and database due out Monday by New Jersey Future — the result of more than three years worth of study — assesses development opportunities around New Jersey’s transit stations and heralds the importance of transit-oriented development.

The report by the smart growth and transportation choice advocacy group shows that what is old is new again in New Jersey as towns look to the past — their train stations — to make them desirable for a new generation of commuters who have eschewed their cars.

“In particular, the ‘Millennial’ generation has expressed a preference for driving less and walking more, and employers are increasingly heeding the imperative to locate in places where they will be accessible to a young workforce that wants multiple transportation options,” the report stated.

New Jersey Future’s research director, Tim Evans, has spent 3 1/2 years assembling a database looking at New Jersey’s 243 transit stations, including 205 rail stations, 16 major bus terminals, 12 ferry terminals and 10 terminals that have more than one mode of transportation, such as Hoboken Terminal, which has trains, buses and ferries.

It’s the first time such a study has been done of New Jersey’s extensive network of transit stations, and suggestions were made for how to better use the vital asset in the future.

The report lists transit municipalities with the greatest number of jobs (Newark, Jersey City, Edison); station areas featuring the highest population densities (9th Street and 2nd Street stations in Hoboken on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail and Hoboken Terminal); stations in neighborhoods where at least one-third of households do not have a vehicle (Warren Street and Washington Street on the Newark Light Rail); stations in neighborhoods having a median home value greater than 200 percent of the statewide median (Millburn, Summit, Peapack) and stations where fewer than one-third of parking spaces are typically occupied (Point Pleasant Beach, Florence, Cinnaminson).

The report could help policy-makers and developers put the right kinds of incentives — such as urban hub tax credits or Transit Village designations — in the right kinds of locations and help municipalities understand the strengths and weaknesses around their transit assets, said Elaine Clisham, New Jersey Future’s director of communications.”

Via: The Star Ledger

Photo: Robert Sciarrino/The Star-Ledger

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