Boxcar a ‘bridge to the future’ for train station parking: Getting There

How can you get people to commute by train if they can’t get to the train station?

Those two-wheeled, buff millennials would have us believe we should all bike our way from home to the train. But not all of us are that athletic or inclined to take our lives in our hands wheeling through traffic and bad weather.

No, the real solution (at least for now) is car-parking. But with a parking permit wait list of up to seven years in many communities, shouldn’t towns be thinking of building new expensive, decked parking lots? Maybe. But not until they’ve made sure they’re maximizing the use of all existing parking opportunities.

That’s where Boxcar comes in. Yes, when it comes to rail station parking, there’s an app for that.

Boxcar bills itself as an “Airbnb for parking.” It matches would-be parkers with private landowners who have available parking spaces near train stations.

Launched in 2017 in Cranford, N.J., Boxcar is the brainchild of 34-year-old Joe Colangelo, who grew up in that town.

Cranford’s a typical commuter town about an hour by train from New York City. Like most such towns, it’s always had about a three-year waiting list for station parking permits. After graduating from the University of California-Berkeley and serving in the U.S. Navy in Afghanistan, Colangelo returned to Cranford and found, decades later, it still had a three-year waiting list.

But he also noticed a lot of empty parking spots at nearby churches and funeral homes. Why couldn’t they be used by commuters, earning the landowners some money and the commuters new access to mass transit? Thus, his app was born.

Boxcar’s app allows a user to find available parking, reserve it up to 14 days in...

from News https://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Boxcar-a-bridge-to-the-future-for-train-13717241.php