Walk the green waterfront oasis of Jersey City’s Liberty State Park on a summer evening and you’ll find it teeming with bicyclists.
Cycling has surged in Jersey City since Mayor Steven Fulop took office in 2013, thanks to his push to paint bike lanes on almost every Jersey City street. An Ironman triathlete, Fulop bikes five to six hours a week and says biking is essential to Jersey City’s transportation network. So it seemed like a natural fit when Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer approached him last February to launch a tri-city bike share program along with Weehawken.
But when the opportunity to link with Citibike in New York City presented itself, Fulop set his sights across the Hudson, seeing more potential in joining an already-existing system with almost 100,000 users. Hoboken decided to stick to their original plan and launch their own bike share.
“I put a great deal of emphasis and importance on the integration with New York City,” said Fulop. “And that was more important to me than integrating with Hoboken and Weehawken because I recognize that a lot of Jersey City residents work in New York and want the accessibility to New York City.” It's not possible to easily bike between Jersey City and Manhattan, but an annual membership would allow renting a bike in either place.
Forty per cent of Jersey City residents commute to Manhattan every day. Derrell Bradford is one of them, and as an avid biker, he thought getting to Hoboken easily was one of the biggest perks of the shared system.
“It’s wholly walkable but you could bike it a lot faster,” said Bradford while on a ride through Liberty State Park on a recent drizzly afternoon. “That’s unfortunate. I guess it’s good for Jersey City people, it’s good for Hoboken people, but not good for Jersey City and Hoboken.”
Citibike is five times more expensive than Hoboken’s program, and Zimmer prioritized affordability over linking with New York. Hoboken bike sharers will only pay $95 a year, compared to Citibike subscribers who will have to pay $149 for an annual subscription.
“My priority was about making sure that bike share is accessible to everyone in Hoboken,” said Zimmer.
The blue docking stations that have become ubiquitous in the lower half of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn are expensive to build. Hoboken’s bikes have a cheaper price tag because they feature a “smart-lock” technology, which means they can be left anywhere, thanks to a GPS technology that lets users find available bikes through the mobile app or website.
But the Hoboken system has its drawbacks as well, according to Michael Smart, a professor in the Bloustein School at Rutgers who specializes in transportation policy. Smart-lock systems can sometimes make it tough to find an available bike, and docking stations have ample room for advertisements, which makes those systems easier to find sponsors.
“It’s too bad that we have two systems,” said Smart. “They don’t directly compete for one another, but they make it less likely that people will be using the system a lot.”
The number of bikes on the road doesn’t appear to be slowing in either city, though. Business is “booming,” according to Joel Ramos, a bike salesman at Grove Street Bicycles in Jersey City. And when Hoboken began installing new bike racks near the Path station, commuters began chaining up their bikes before builders could finish bolting the racks to the ground.
“It’s literally as we build it, they will come,” said Zimmer.
Combining the systems is one of Zimmer’s long-term goals. She still plans to expand to Weehawken once Hoboken’s program gets off the ground, and Zimmer said she has been talking to Mayor de Blasio about offering a discounted dual subscription program for Hoboken residents who bike ride on both sides of the Hudson.