By Andrew Tangel
Working in suburbia comes with sedentary drawbacks.
There is the long drive to work, followed by sitting at a desk
for hours, then plopping down in a car again for the ride home.
Now a suburban office park in Whippany, N.J., about an hour's
drive from Manhattan, is offering its denizens a perk more
associated with city life: shared bicycles to run errands, fetch
lunch or exercise outdoors. The cost is $2 an hour.
"Sitting at your desk all day is not very healthy," 52-year-old
Gary Kocsis of Bethlehem, Pa., said as he parked one of the six
blue bikes into a newly installed gray docking station following a
20-minute jaunt around the Crossings at Jefferson Park.
Riders such as Mr. Kocsis, who works in the information
technology department at a bank, can check out bicycles with a
membership or credit card.
Rudy Cesnek, 58, said he often brings his own folding bike to
ride during the lunch hour, but now might start using the office
park's shared bikes. They may have benefits beyond recreation, he
added.
"It's good for the heart," Mr. Cesnek said. "The healthier the
employees, the less you pay for insurance."
The office park's owner, Vision Real Estate Partners, is
competing with other property owners trying to attract employers
drawn to urban centers, which increasingly offer short-term bicycle
rental programs such as Citi Bike in New York City.
The landlord is among a number of businesses across the country
rolling out shared bicycles for their employees. Companies,
universities and apartment buildings are offering shared bikes not
available for the public as a means of transit.
Shared bikes have been a fixture of other office complexes, such
as Google Inc.'s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
In New York City, financial giant American Express Co. plans to
offer 20 bikes for employees, giving them another way to travel
between its Manhattan headquarters on Vesey Street and its offices
on Hudson Street, a spokeswoman said.
The company's "Point2Ppoint" program is slated to launch this
fall. "We wanted to promote new opportunities for our employees to
get out and be active during the workday," an American Express
spokeswoman said in an email.
Even auto maker General Motors Co. is warming up to the car's
two-wheeled nemesis. The company on Tuesday launched a system of 50
bikes on its sprawling 330-acre campus in Warren, Mich.
The 19,000 employees and contractors who work in its 61
buildings are often hard-pressed to find a parking that is close
by, a spokeswoman said. And its shuttle buses don't stop at all the
buildings, often forcing employees to walk long distances.
GM hopes the program will help it understand the increasing
appeal of cycling to consumers who eschew driving for other means
of transportation.
"We have to understand that to remain viable," the spokeswoman
said.
GM rents the bikes from Zagster Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based
provider. Riders can punch in a code to open boxes on the bikes
holding keys to locks that secure them to racks.
Riders can find Zagster bikes at apartment buildings owned by
the New York real estate giant Related Cos. Related has been in
advance talks to acquire a controlling stake in Alta Bicycle Share
Inc., the Portland, Ore., company that operates Citi Bike and some
of the largest public bike-shares elsewhere in the country.
San Francisco's airport offers shared bikes for its employees.
So does health-care giant Humana Inc. at its campus in downtown
Louisville, Ky.
Bikes have long been used as a way to get around in blue-collar
settings as workers move from place to place in a sprawling
factory, for example.
Worksman Trading Corp., a bike manufacturer based in Queens, has
been selling bicycles and tricycles for use at companies' factories
or industrial sites since at least the 1940s, said president and
co-owner Wayne Sosin.
"Bike-share is really just a new term for an old concept," he
said.
Nick Pinto contributed to this article.
Write to Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com
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