Citi Bike, 10 years old and part of New York street life

Good morning. It is Friday. We’ll look at something that a transportation lawyer told me was “an idea that seemed impossible, and now New York City can’t live without it.”

On Wednesday, we congratulated the Brooklyn Bridge on its birthday and celebrated how transformative it was. Citi Bike is only 10 as of tomorrow, but it too has changed the city in many ways.

City Bicyclemanaged by the ride-share company Lyfthas tried to count those ways.

It says the initial fleet of 6,000 bikes made 46,854 rides in that first week on the street, enough to put the entire population of Palm Springs, California, or Charlottesville, Virginia, on two-wheelers.

Since then, passenger numbers have exploded: two weeks ago, Citi Bike customers made 867,840 rides, a record. And the company now has just under 30,000 bikes. About 6,000 of them are e-bikes.

“It’s been extremely transformative,” said Sarah Kaufman, the interim director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University. “It has opened up New York to a viable alternative mode of transportation. It has opened up parts of the city that were previously insufficiently accessible for transit. And it played an important role in 2020, as the pandemic hit and people were looking for socially distanced ways to travel.”

There were also New Yorkers who said cycling was cool. “When it launched, it was like lightning in a bottle,” he said Edward Skyler, a former deputy mayor who, as executive vice president of Citibank, now oversees the bank’s sponsorship of Citi Bike. Social media posts with celebrities — “Leonardo DiCaprio takes a ride on a Citi Bike with his new girlfriend,” as Skyler described one — led to “promotion we didn’t expect,” he told me.

Citi Bike’s hipness quotient has continued, most recently with a guest appearance on the HBO series “Succession”. Citibank is so committed to Citi Bike that Skyler said it has already extended its sponsorship deal through 2034. The deal, which expires next year, was worth $70.5 million. Terms of the new deal have not been disclosed.

“An idea that seemed impossible” that New York can’t live without

Danny Harris, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a bicycle and pedestrian safety advocacy group, called Citi Bike “another great example of an idea that seemed impossible, and now New York City can’t live without it.”

But he followed that sentence with “and yet.” Citi Bike is still not in every neighborhood, he said, and the city is behind on its commitment to building protected bike lanes.

The blue bikes became well-known landmarks in Manhattan soon after the program started, but Citi Bike got off to a shaky start. After nearly 18 months, The New York Times said it had been kicked into obscurity “since the day it started”. Lyft took over in 2018 and announced a $100 million capital injection designed to double the size of the Citi Bike service area and increase the number of bikes.

Lyft’s arrival roughly coincided with increasing frustration over subway and bus delays, which led more people to cycle. Some who have followed the evolution of Citi Bike say attitudes on the street changed along the way. Janette Sadik-Khan, who was the city’s transportation commissioner when Citi Bike debuted, said cycling in New York used to be “blood sport, like a Mad Max warrior on a city street.”

Now, she told me, more than half a million people cycle in the city every day, more than the number of cars on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Cross Bronx Expressway combined. The city’s Department of Transportation says bike traffic across the East River bridges hit new highs last year, with more than 24,000 bike rides a day.

Tracks to drive on

The city has been working to build its network of bike lanes, although critics like Harris say the new lanes haven’t been built fast enough and not enough are protected, meaning they have barriers to keep bikes and cars apart.

In 2013, the city had about 830 miles of bike lanes, with about 500 miles of protected lanes, the vast majority in parks and open spaces: only 30 miles of protected lanes were on the street. Now the city has 1,500 miles of bike lanes, with more than 125 miles of protected street lanes.

Harris says the city fell short last year by building fewer miles of protected lanes than the 30 called for in the NYC Streets Plan, a transportation master plan mandated by the City Council in 2019. A Department of Transportation spokesperson said the city installed 26.3 miles last year, “pretty close to 30.”

According to the street plan, 50 miles of protected lanes would be built this year. Harris said only four miles have been built so far; the group’s website says 22 miles are under construction. The spokesperson for the department said that “there will be a record production of protected bike lanes by 2023”, adding that “the goal is to reach 50”.

‘Reflects New York City’s population much more than it used to’

Like Citi Bikes itself, Citi Bike docking stations became part of the landscape. But the company was criticized for appearing to cater to wealthier neighborhoods. It did not expand to the Bronx until 2019.

“It’s improved, but it hasn’t improved to the level we think it should,” Olivia Leirer, the co-executive director of New York Communities for Change, who released a sharply critical report in 2019 on neighborhood coverage of City Bike. .

Citi Bike now has more than 1,800 bike parks in the city, not quite six times the number it started with in 2013. Caroline Samponaro, Lyft’s vice president of transportation, bike and scooter policy, said the company has “radically changed demographics” . Citi Bike, she said, “reflects the population of New York City much more than it used to.”

The company says 51 percent of riders now come from communities of color, 64 percent of its station network is outside of Manhattan, and Citi Bikes will be available in 70 percent of city-owned public housing by the end of the year.

Citi Bike sees more of an electric future ahead. It is exploring ‘station charging’ – bike docks that can charge the batteries of its e-bikes.

Today, Citi Bike shuttles vans from one docking station to another with workers checking batteries, chains, pedals, and tires. They take out low batteries and put in fully charged ones. Samponaro said electrifying 20 to 30 percent of docking stations would reduce battery replacements by nearly 90 percent.

Weather

Enjoy a sunny day with a high around 72. Expect mostly clear skies at night and a low around 58 with little wind.

ALTERNATIVE SIDE PARKING

Suspended today and tomorrow (Shavuot) and Monday (Memorial Day).

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