Bloomberg text part2: “This is one of the most densely populated cities in the country. There aren’t really blank slates to design new parks. So we’ve had to get really creative for increasing public space,” said Patel.

Try, Try Again

In 2020, the city’s willingness to experiment led it to launch a pilot with Via, the company that dominates the US market for microtransit — on-demand shared transportation services. (The February announcement was overshadowed by another press conference later that day, for the city’s first Covid-19 restrictions.) But even as the pandemic clobbered transit ridership overall, the fleet of purple vans quickly hit its goal of 1,000 rides a week, and then expanded service to weekends. It hit its millionth ride mark in August, over two years after the launch.

Microtransit has a very mixed record in North America, as many programs launched in small towns and rural areas as replacements for fixed-route bus systems have struggled with high costs and low efficiency. Jersey City’s approach was to prioritize the periphery: Rides can only be summoned in outlying areas not well served by existing transit, and rides to transit stops cost a city-subsidized $2. That might help explain its popularity during the pandemic; it primarily attracted neighborhoods where frontline workers were more likely to live. Nearly 90% of riders are non-white, and about half are low-income.

Transportation-Tech Startup Via Confidentially Files For IPO A Via microtransit van in Jersey City in 2021.Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg “A lot of other cities have said to these companies, ‘Come and do whatever you can to fix our transit,’” said Patel. “But we wanted to be intentional when we co-created it with Via. We didn’t just want a bunch of vans clogging downtown.”

Alex Lavoie, a chief operating officer at Via, described the company’s Jersey City program as “primarily a first- and last-mile use case,” noting that “Jersey City has some great connectivity, but there are parts that are transit deserts, and quite disconnected historically.”

Currently, there are more than 40 Via vans tooling around Jersey City. On a recent chilly morning, I spotted several of them dropping off riders at Journal Square, a major transportation hub. (PATH stations make up four of the top five destinations.) Riders who I spoke with briefly as they rushed to work all said they enjoyed the service, citing cost and convenience.

Via’s arrival in the city’s mobility ecosystem also helped on the traffic safety front, by getting some drivers off the roads — transit trips are vastly safer than car trips in the US.

relates to How Jersey City Got to Zero Traffic Deaths on Its Streets New improvements to the city’s bike lanes include adding protections like parking lanes and concrete barriers.Photo: John Surico/Bloomberg CityLab Jersey City’s obsession with piloting also extends to operations, as seen in how its bicycle infrastructure continues to evolve.

Most local bike lanes I saw on previous visits were of standard ilk, striped with acrylic green or white paint; a few were separated from traffic with plastic flexposts. But I noticed a shift in more recent weeks. Many lanes, especially newer ones stretching north to Hoboken — the state’s other Vision Zero city — were coated in Endurablend, a polymerized cement coating whose dimpled pattern makes the paint appear as part of the asphalt. And rather than just flexposts, they were now protected by all sorts of things: concrete Jersey barriers, barrels, cones or vehicle parking.

Advocates have pushed the city to constantly tinker with new ways to bolster the system — due in some part to concern that future administrations could yank them out. So bike lanes are improved systematically. There is an inherent cost benefit as well: Rather than constantly repainting lanes or fixing flattened flex posts, the city saves money in the long run by investing in more robust materials. Bike advocates say that the upgrades help cement the infrastructure as a part of the streetscape, attracting new riders.

“This makes cycling more visible,” said Ayla Schermer, the president of Bike JC, an advocacy group. “Yes, it allows the city to learn and adjust. But it also makes people who wouldn’t be as willing to cycle be more confident that it’s a serious thing. A flattened flexpost can dash that.”

The Politics of Safety Schermer’s group sits on the Vision Zero Task Force, a group stipulated by law that meets with the mayor’s team every quarter to discuss progress. So does Safe Streets Jersey City, founded by a local couple, Kara Hrabosky and Paul Bellan-Boyer, in 2013 after they lost their neighbor in a car crash. The group’s new president, Jimmy Lee, said the meetings help keep the city on track.

“It’s not enough to only adopt Vision Zero as a goal,” said Lee. “I think there has to be a real commitment in terms of hiring professionals for which safety is the primary goal. I’m not a traffic expert, but it does seem a lot of the orthodoxy in engineering is the opposite of that.”

Just about everyone I spoke with for this story mentioned the support of Mayor Fulop — now on his third term — as a key factor. (As well as Patel as the brains within City Hall.) In the five years since we last spoke, it’s clear that the mayor has now mastered the parlance of street safety: When we spoke, he sounded more like a planner, talking in detail about future plans for bus rapid transit and bike lanes.

relates to How Jersey City Got to Zero Traffic Deaths on Its Streets During the pandemic, Jersey City managed to carve out more space for pedestrian use in downtown streets. Many of those changes have been made permanent.Photo: John Surico/Bloomberg CityLab But that’s where it gets tough. Another term I heard often: “low-hanging fruit.” So far, most of the city’s interventions have been downtown, and largely avoided loss of on-street parking. (In fact, some, like St. Pauls Avenue, might even add some.) And typically they’ve involved roads that had some space to spare.

“We always started in locations where we could say, ‘You’re not losing too much,’” said Patel. “Our first bike lane project couldn’t be one where we were removing an entire lane of parking, because we knew we would never be able to do another one again. We tried to minimize the perceived trade-offs as much as possible.”

The idea is to focus on more politically palatable locations, show what’s possible, and then expand outward from there. So far, the strategy seems to be working: not only have traffic fatalities fallen, but cycling ridership is way up. This last quarter, Citi Bike, which operates in Jersey City, saw usage increase to more than 15,000 peak rides per week on average.

The hope is that people will notice. That includes council members in wards that are more car-dependent, as well as state and county officials. And with federal infrastructure dollars on the way to state coffers, residents are betting that local results will form a groundswell.