Let’s Take a Quick Look at Hoboken After 24 Hours of e-Scooters…

Let’s Take a Quick Look at Hoboken After 24 Hours of e-Scooters…

UPDATED: 2:24 p.m.

In case you’ve been under a rock, Hoboken rolled out its e-scooter pilot program yesterday. If you ARE in fact under a rock, you may be one of the many who seem terrified by this new means of conveyance, and are hiding under said rock until people figure out how to use these things…

Nope…

According to Hoboken Police Chief Kenneth Ferrante, the Hoboken Police Department has fielded “close to 1,000” complaints, comments and questions (Chief has clarified, 2:46 p.m.) about the scooters in the last 24 hours. As twitter and other social media platforms are not constantly monitored, Ferrante has asked that those with genuine complaints about specific violations and concerns please email Traffic@HobokenPD.org.

UPDATE: Hoboken PD have now put out direct contact for the scooter companies to share any comments/concerns with those companies directly.


Councilman Michael DeFusco
has commented that he’s disappointed with the way the City launched the program—a program for which he had been an early and steady advocate.

Reports of collisions, near collisions and discarded scooters cluttering sidewalks were flowing across all social media platforms. Meanwhile others were enjoying the scooters:

Rules for using the scooters (must be 18+, only one person per scooter, NO RIDING ON SIDEWALKS, and more…) have been posted on the City’s website. The City will also be hosting a number of Hoboken Safety Education Events held over the next few weeks, aimed at acclimating potential riders to the scooters.

hMAG has heard from Transportation Director Ryan Sharp, who sent along these statistics that recap the first day of the program.

“In summary, there were total of 2,500+ trips and 1,700+ unique riders, and this is only in 11 hours without an AM rush hour period. Ojo added approximately 175 trips yesterday. For some context, I believe that this is about double the ridership of JerseyBike’s all-time record ridership day,” said Sharp, who was headed to a meeting with the scooter service providers later this morning. “We’ll need to see what the data looks like as things normalize, but this is a pretty good indication that the e-scooters are extremely popular. I know there were a lot of complaints as well, which we will address in our meeting this morning, but it’s important to have context on the ridership going into that discussion.”

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Authored by: hMAG