Essex St. Station is a station located in Jersey City, served by the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, and opened in April 2000 as one of the HBLR’s original stations. Let’s take a look.
The platform is rather normal, being low-level and featuring level boarding with the Kinkisharyo streetcars that are used. There’s some benches and a ticket vending machine and……a ticket reader????? Yeah, I’m not exactly sure why they need machines to read the tickets or what “validating” it does – isn’t buying the ticket good enough?! Unfortunately, when I first rode the HBLR a couple of days prior to coming here, I didn’t know this and may have accidentally fare evaded – and experienced culture shock when I found out that the HBLR runs on the honor system alone, rather than have fareboxes at either/both ends of the car. Yeah, I was bewildered. Whoops. Anyways, there’s also some shelter from the elements, but it’s not exactly enclosed. As for land use around the station, it’s actually pretty dense and pretty good, given it’s Jersey City. There’s also a park nearby, neat! Lastly, this area is also a decent place to railfan the HBLR.
The good: It’s in a dense area! (the station came first, as far as I’m aware) Furthermore, there’s the standard amenities you’d expect – plus ticketing machines. Where I’m from (the Boston area), you’d be LUCKY to have a TVM on a surface-level station. Lastly, the land use is actually really good around here.
The bad: Do the countdown clocks work properly? Actually, I don’t even recall seeing one. There’s also not a proper enclosed shelter, but whatever. There’s also no real bus connection here, but also not a dealbreaker with how short a walk it is to the nearest real connection.
Nearby points of interest: The Colgate clock is nearby! There’s also some green spaces and a few restaurants and shops.
Transit connections:
NJT (Hudson-Bergen Light Rail)
Overall, it’s not a bad station. Average? Yeah, kinda. But, it’s still not utter and complete shit.
Rating: 7/10
