By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton council members are looking to expand the parts of town where residents cannot park on the street overnight unless they can prove they have a hardship and buy a permit.
In June, the council is expected to introduce an ordinance that extends the prohibition to parts of the former township located around the fringes of the old borough, officials said Wednesday. The ordinance will define overnight in those areas as between 2:30 a.m. and 6 a.m., although that time “might” be bumped up to 5:30 a.m. to accommodate businesses that open early, Councilwoman Jo S. Butler said Thursday.
Official say what they are doing is harmonizing pre-consolidation parking rules that remain on the books. At the moment, if residents live in the former township, they can leave their car on the street overnight. A handful of sections — Birch and Leigh avenues and Race and John streets and the residential areas around the high school — require a permit. There is no charge involved.
Things are different if residents live in the old borough. There, overnight parking is prohibited throughout. Residents have to prove they have a hardship, such as not having a driveway, and then buy a permit — either $30 per quarter or $120 for the year.
Violators face a $40 ticket. “We generally don’t tow a vehicle for overnight parking unless the car is left on the street for an extended period time and there’s multiple tickets on the windshield,” police Sgt. Steven Riccitello said Thursday.
The issue about on-street parking comes into play most acutely in neighborhoods where streets are governed by the two different sets of parking ordinances because they straddle the old township-borough boundary line. Council is in the midst of harmonizing those and all other ordinances to give the town one complete set of municipal laws.
The proposed overnight parking ordinance would leave the rest of the former township unchanged, so if residents were allowed to park on the street overnight, they still will be able to. But some council members think that’s a mistake.
Councilwoman Jenny Crumiller said this week that it is bad public policy for the municipal government to provide what amounts to “free, private parking” on public streets. She said that, ideally, there would be no overnight, on-street parking except in limited cases where people paid for it.
“My view is that free parking is not a right nor is it the government’s obligation to provide free, private parking,” she said. “The cost of parking is a cost that is part of owning a car.”
That position fits into her broader view that the town “should not be incentivizing car ownership.” In the past, she expressed her support for higher gasoline prices to accomplish that end. For her part, Ms. Crumiller and her family have three cars at their home.
She said that in places where there is the most residential density, “parking is the most scarce.”
“There is no getting around that problem,” she said.
Ms. Crumiller rejected the notion that expanding the no-overnight parking areas and imposing the mandatory permit fees will be felt mostly on residents in low to moderate income parts of town. She said there are other parts of Princeton that will be subject to the regulations too.
For his part, Council President Bernard P. Miller said this week that he too favors a total ban for, among other reasons, pedestrian safety.
Ms. Crumiller and Mr. Miller sat on a task force that spent nearly 12 months looking at the parking issue. They came up with three options for the full Princeton Council to consider.
One is to leave things as they are; a second option is to make the rules uniform on streets that straddle the old borough-township line or are adjacent to the old borough. The third option is a total ban on overnight parking.
The council debated the issue at its meeting Monday. Officials agreed to introduce an ordinance calling for the second of those three options, rather than have another work session where they discuss the issue all over again.
Ms. Crumiller could not predict how the vote would go next month. So far, the broader community has not weighed in.
“We need public input,” Mr. Miller said Wednesday.
