A year and a half after Hoboken announced that it would launch a joint bike share program with Weehawken and Jersey City, the project remains stuck in limbo, waiting on enough funding from private sponsorships to begin. Since the beginning of 2014, the projected start date for the bike share has slid from June 2014 to November 2014 to March 2015 to “early spring” 2015.
The city of Hoboken now refuses to provide an expected deadline for the program’s launch, though Vijay Chaudhuri, the chief of staff to Mayor Dawn Zimmer, said this past week that he was “confident that the city will get the funding necessary to launch the program in the near future.”
In a recent interview, Zimmer said the Hudson County bike share was “definitely happening in 2015.”
When it was announced in March 2014, the program was slated to be the first and largest next-generation bike share system in North America. Now that distinction belongs to Pittsburgh, which opened its 50-station, 500-bike system at the end of May.
With the departure of Jersey City, which decided last fall to join New York’s CitiBike system instead, 60 percent of the Hudson County program’s projected size was cancelled out.
Sponsors slow in coming
To be sure, Hoboken, Weehawken, and the contractors hired to run the joint bike share are farther along in the process they were a year ago. The cutting edge German “smart bikes” that will be used in the program were approved for use in the United States by the Federal Communications Commission this past winter, and in Hoboken, the City Council authorized 29 locations for bike share docking stations, so that every residence in the city is within a three-minute walk.
The hold-up, as before, appears to be financial, not logistical. Like New York’s CitiBike program, the Hoboken-Weehawken program has consciously eschewed state and federal funding, relying on private sponsorships, advertising dollars, and membership fees to cover its costs.
“The official launch will happen once we finish raising the necessary sponsorship dollars.”—Chris Wogas
____________
That alone might not have led to funding issues if CitiBike ran swimmingly and stayed in the red. Instead, the New York system weathered a year of criticism over clunky docks and fritzy technology, only to reveal shortly before Hoboken’s bike share was announced that it needed tens of millions more in sponsorships in order to cover operating costs and expansion into Brooklyn, Queens, and upper Manhattan.
“When Citi Bike had their issues, now all of a sudden sponsors are much more cautious and that’s had a significant impact, unfortunately,” Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop told the Wall Street Journal last June.
Sources say Fulop’s decision last fall to drop out of the joint Hudson County program and join the CitiBike system also had a negative impact on fundraising. The breakup removed 60 percent of the joint program’s coverage area in one fell swoop, not to mention $2.5 million in sponsorship funds Fulop said he had secured, which will now fund the purchase of the first 350 bikes for his system, according to The New Yorker.
The German-engineered NextBikes that will make up Hoboken’s system cost only $1,200 each, compared to $5,000 per individual CitiBike, because they do not require special docks and can be locked to any bike rack using a “smart lock.”
Selling ad space
The fundraising efforts for the Hoboken-Weehawken program are being managed by Bike and Roll, which will operate the system, and P3 Global Management, the system’s main investment capital partner.
Both firms, as well as the city of Hoboken, declined to comment in recent weeks on how much of the estimated necessary $2.5 million initial investment to launch the bike share program has been secured.
The firms could potentially have less than $1 million in funding banked so far. Under their March 2014 agreement with Hoboken, Weehawken, and Jersey City, the firms must have their bike share system up and running within three months of securing “a total sponsorship commitment of at least $1 million,” with the possibility of a single six-month extension.
“We are committed to bringing Next-Gen Bike Share to Hoboken and Weehawken in the near future,” said Chris Wogas, the president of Bike and Roll. “The official launch will happen once we finish raising the necessary sponsorship dollars to produce the highest quality bike share system for our customers along the vibrant New Jersey waterfront.”
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.