State to serve as guinea pig for parking facility study.

The Urban Land Institute and the Urban Land Institute Foundation have announced it has awarded ULI Northern New Jersey District Council with a Community Action Grant of $20,000 to fund their project "Getting It Right on the Money: Paying for Structured Parking in Smart Growth Urban Communities." This project has been undertaken in partnership with the New Jersey Institute of Technology to complement a $410,000 grant that it received from the New Jersey Department of Transportation to develop design guidelines and management standards for structured parking at mass transit facilities.

Championing this project from the ULI NNJ's advisory services panel committee are Linda Morgan, senior vice president of Fidelco Realty Group, based in Newark, N.J.; Richard F. X. Johnson, chair of ULI NNJ and principal of the Matrix Development Group, based in in Cranbury, N.J.; Allen Trousdale, principal of Grad Associates, based in Newark, N.J.; and Darius Sollohub, associate director of the infrastructure planning program at the NJIT School of Architecture.

"On behalf of the committee, we are excited to receive this grant from ULI," said Morgan. "We hope that these additional funds will enable us to focus on one of the most significant challenges of transit and urban parking structures: getting them to make economic sense in the initial operating years. Through this two-year study we can document specific strategies for underwriting parking garages; recommend to state and local authorities specific mechanisms and entities to facilitate the financing and construction of the garages; and establish successful precedents from one or more case-study communities."

The project will dovetail with each of the three phases of the NJIT grant. The first phase will be a comprehensive evaluation that will include a multi-disciplinary literature review, consulting with experts nationally at both the agency and professional levels, examining and documenting parking facilities in the field. The second phase will be to conceptually design facilities at four locations in New Jersey and analyze their feasibility. From these results, the final phase will be to develop design guidelines and management standards that utilize state-of-the-art practice specifically tailored to conditions around the state's transit facilities.

"We are confident that through our findings, this study will have applicability to other communities nationwide, as municipalities face similar issues in trying to achieve consensus to design, finance and operate structured parking garages in transit reliant communities," said Johnson. "By encouraging new ideas and supporting entrepreneurial projects, all communities benefit."