Get a pushbike. Persuade everyone you know to get a pushbike. Make them persuade everyone they know to get a pushbike.
Start a campaign for people to only use their cars if they i) Have to or ii) are travelling over 10 miles.
Make workplaces have facilities for cyclists. (Perhaps going as far as treating car-parking spaces as a taxable perk). Make schools have facilities for cyclists. Make shops have facilities for cyclists.
Persuade the bad cyclists to stop being idiots. etc.
There is a river in between. You would need to bike up to the George Washington assuming he lives in Hoboken and commute to Midtown. Either way you go from a 45 minute commute to maybe a 2-3 hour commute if you are lucky. Even worse since now using a bike his commute is ~20 miles instead of the 4 in the first place.
You are responding to me, the person whose problem you think you solved. I take a bus that costs $98/month. The ferry is over $300 for a monthly pass. If I want to take the ferry tomorrow, with my bike, for example, it'll be about $20 for a daily round trip. My best option would be to taking a folding bike so I can take a train. That would work on nice days.
However, what I'm really asking for is to solve the problem for the millions of commuters. It's crazy that people waste so much time commuting.
Cycling does not work for you because of your weird river situation.
Cycling is a solution for the millions of people who have commutes of 4 miles without rivers in between. It's a solution for most people in most other situations.
I did the NJ->NYC commute for a couple of years (Parsippany->Soho, 1.5 hours door to door). It was pretty awful. I'm really glad our governor nixed the idea of building another tunnel.
If its only taking him 45 minutes he's probably not driving in and parking, he's probably taking mass transit on a system that is quite overloaded. So no, you didn't solve his problem, but nice try.
Start a campaign for people to only use their cars if they i) Have to or ii) are travelling over 10 miles.
Make workplaces have facilities for cyclists. (Perhaps going as far as treating car-parking spaces as a taxable perk). Make schools have facilities for cyclists. Make shops have facilities for cyclists.
Persuade the bad cyclists to stop being idiots. etc.