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New parking plan gets four-week test run
(by Maggie Fazeli Fard - May 14, 2008)
In light of recommendations made by the borough engineer, the Montvale Mayor and Council voted unanimously last Tuesday to temporarily reconfigure parking regulations on Edgren Way and Hilton Place with hopes of alleviating traffic around
Fieldstone
Middle School.
In March, after four months of fielding concerns about child safety before and after school hours, the governing body engaged Borough Engineer Andrew Hipolit of Maser Consulting to investigate the traffic conditions at and around the school.
On May 13, Hipolit reported that he and a traffic engineer from his firm conducted about six site visits at the school and surrounding neighborhoods over the past month.
“We said the problem is there’s only one way in and one way out,” said Hipolit.
Fieldstone has two access points for cars and pedestrians on Spring Valley Road and Edgren Way, with additional pedestrian access from Hilton Place. More than 400 students attend Fieldstone and less than half of them get picked up after school.
“We looked at everything from completely demolishing on-site parking, putting a loop road in… We looked at the whole gamut,” Hipolit said. “Some of the proposals could cost hundreds of thousands or a million or more dollars.”
Keeping the borough’s budgetary constraints in mind, Hipolit devised a plan based on recommendations made by Sgt. Bruce Czesniewski, the Montvale Police Department’s traffic officer, two months ago: Open up the south side of Hilton Place, where stopping, standing and parking are currently prohibited on both sides, to after school traffic in exchange for closing off the north side of Edgren Way, where stopping, standing and parking are currently permitted on both sides.
In other words, parking will be permitted only on the south sides of both Hilton and Edgren.
Hipolit’s plan also includes prohibiting parking on Ramapo Road, prohibiting U-turns on Hilton Place and Edgren Way, and putting two police officers on duty to negotiate the traffic situation. In addition to the cost of placing two officers on site, the borough will purchase “No Parking,” “No U-turn,” and “Pedestrian Crossing” signs.
The new rules will be in effect from Wednesday, May 28 through Friday, June 20. Since the parking changes are temporary, the police chief is permitted to enact the changes himself. An ordinance to open up the south side of Hilton Place and close one side of Edgren Way was defeated by the governing body in March.
“It is a good enough window to test it see if it works,” said Hipolit of the four-week trial period.
Not everyone, however, was thrilled with the plan.
“I think this plan is more about convenience than safety,” said Councilman Martin Kent, who for months has voiced his concern that parking reconfigurations such as these would have a “ricochet effect.”
“All you’re going to do is extend this line of people down Hilton and down Edgren,” said Kent. “I just want to see this go further. You did the best with what you had to work with. Maybe that’s the problem. How far are we willing to go?”
Hipolit said that while drastic changes are not out of the question, they would be very costly. This plan, he said, would be a good start.
“Based on what we’ve seen,” said Hipolit, “a change needs to be made. It can’t stay status quo.”
When the trial period is over, the governing body will solicit feedback from the board of education, school administration parents, residents and the police department in order to determine how to proceed. Hipolit said that it is possible to quantify the results by monitoring the numbers of cars and pedestrians as well as their behaviors in order to come up with a mathematical matrix.
But he said a more reliable and relatively easy measurement of success is “everyone says it’s working real well.”
If at the end of the trial period everyone agrees that the traffic changes solved the problems, they could be made permanent in time for the start of the new school year this September. If everyone agrees that the problems worsened, the parking regulations would revert back to what they currently are.
But Councilman Timothy Lane, liaison to the board of education, pointed out that at this point even a small improvement would be a step in the right direction and could act as a stopgap measure until more drastic work could be done next summer.
“If this works well but doesn’t work great,” said Lane, “we may have to live with it through the 2008-2009 school year.”
Maggie Fazeli Fard's e-mail address is fazelifard@northjersey.com.
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