Citi Bike! (And Apologies)

April was certainly a hectic month on this end. During the week, my work calendar was completely over-booked (great for the business but stressful for me) and on three out of four weekends Ed and I jetted off to Vegas, San Antonio, and Reno for weddings and other social get-togethers. Whew! Hence my radio silence, for which I apologize. May is off to a calmer start: The pace at the office will still be brisk, but not frantic, and our travel agenda is less strenuous. I hope to resume posting with my usual frequency.

Enough groveling. On to my first post in a little more than a month:

A little less than a year ago, shared bike stations started popping up all over lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

New York, it seemed, was finally joining the ranks of sophisticated cities, like Paris, Washington, D.C., and Mexico City. This being New York, though, there were, of course, complaints about the new program. The stations took up a lot of curb space, some griped, leaving less room for parking. So few people drive here, though, it was hard to believe the curb would be too problematic. Others complained that Citibank's sponsorship of the new Citi Bike program meant annoying advertisements in residential neighborhoods. When every bus shelter, light post, subway tunnel, and passing taxi play host to ad space, however, this also seemed to be a fairly pointless objection. Generally, the new program was met with excitement.

Each dot is a station.

Citi Bike turned out to be enormously popular among average New Yorkers in western Brooklyn and southern Manhattan. (Because the program is in its infancy, only parts of the city currently have service.) The solid blue frames were soon ubiquitous in the park, on riding/running paths, and on streets. Cab drivers, and many other motorists, hated them from the beginning, and so did some pedestrians. The average Citi Biker was not an experienced cyclist and often rode with a dangerously obliviousness to the obstacles on all sides. Many went the wrong way down one way streets and ignored traffic signals if there were no cars, causing walkers to have to leap out of the way. Most of them didn't wear helmets, either.

I didn't really form an opinion initially, other than musing that more cyclists on the roads would force drivers to be more careful, even if the change was slow in coming and involved some casualties first. I figured didn't have any cause to join the program, myself. For one, I was the owner of a great bike. My bike is great enough, though, that I can't really ride it around the city to run errands; I'm too scared to leave it locked outside where it might be stolen. It's really more suited to long bike rides on which I don't ever get off it. Secondly, my commute was no more than half a mile and was easily walkable.

On the other hand, crosstown transportation options in New York are limited, and biking would be a nice alternative to the slow buses. And I like biking. When I started to really think about all the occasions I could take a bike in lieu of the subway, my interest piqued. And when I found myself signed up to proctor the SAT at a school due east of Chelsea, I realized that a 25-30 minute trip with public transportation would take just over 10 minutes on a bike. I decided to give it a whirl.

This is what my fob will look like.

Citi Bike passes are available for a single day ($10) or a whole a week ($27). Locals can buy a yearlong membership ($100), with a $15 discount if a Citibank card is used for the transaction. Regardless of the package, users get unlimited use of the bikes while their pass/membership is active for stints of 30 or 40 minutes at a time. One simply unlocks a bike (with a code for pass holders and a key fob for members) at any station, rides to another station near one's destination, and docks the bike again. Bike can be checked out of and returned to any station, and there is a station every 1 or 2 blocks in lower Manhattan.

On the Saturday of the SAT, I walked three minutes to the nearest station to my apartment and purchased a pass for a week with my credit card. The machine gave me a code, which I entered into one dock, then several others. No dice. Returning to the machine, I got a second code, and this one worked. I mounted up and was off. Early morning was a great time for my first ride since few cars or pedestrians were about. The bike itself was solid and comfortable to ride. There were three gears, a bell, and a very convenient basket-like receptacle between the handlebars with a beefy bungee cord for securing a bag or purse. I loved the ride from the moment it began. The so-called long blocks melted away and I was at my destination before I knew it. I docked my bike, which required a rather firm slam, and went in to the nearby school. Four hours later, I undocked another bike and set off home.

A cheerful rider, sensibly helmeted, makes use of the basket. 

My second day of riding was a little less charmed. After meeting failure after failure trying to unlock a bike, I called the service number to complain. My call was answered promptly and I learned that the station had a "low charge." (The stations are all battery powered for some ridiculous reason, though the credit card machines are solar powered; this explains why I was able to obtain a code but not use it at any of the docks.) The woman assured me that a van was on the way to recharge it and offered to direct me to a nearby station. During the ten or so minutes I'd been trying to access a bike, however, a Citi Bike had been sitting next to an adjacent building, unaccompanied, and I decided to use it. Users are charged $1,000 for lost bikes, and I figured I could ride this one to where I needed to go and dock it there. The user who had checked it out could get another one any time he/she needed it from the recharged station, and this way I'd be both getting to my destination and saving the bike from being stolen, unguarded as it was. My ride was, again, great. Later that day when I was ready to return home, I found that the nearest station to me was offline. Four bikes were locked there, but this station, too, seemed to need a charge. So I walked a block to another station, unlocked a bike, and rode home without incident.

It's amazing how easy it is to get around Manhattan on a bike. The city seems to have shrunk over the course of this weekend. I enjoyed riding around enough that I've decided to purchase a membership for the year. With the Citibank discount, my investment will cost the same as about 34 subway rides, or 17 round trips. It won't take long for the membership to start paying for itself*. And I think the enjoyment I get from riding around will more than make up for the annoyances: oblivious pedestrians, aggressive drivers, and occasionally malfunctioning stations. Careful riding can just about eliminate risks caused by the first two, and by walking a block in nearly any direction I can get around the third. My key fob will arrive in about a week, and until then I still have five days left of my membership to cruise around this suddenly-smaller city.


*I hope that the program will exist long enough for me to make all those rides, however. Ed tells me that Citi Bike is almost bankrupt. One cause of this is that the program isn't making as much money as anticipated. Apparently the one in DC is quite profitable, largely because tourists buy so many expensive day passes. Tourists aren't doing that in New York at the rate predicted though, which I can understand; this can be a scary city to ride around if you're not used to it. And the best place to ride confidently, Central Park, has stations only along its southern border. Many more annual passes than predicted have been purchased by locals, but those don't bring in much money. Also, the cost of personnel and vans that drive around the city to maintain the stations and redistribute bikes when one station has too few open docks and another has too many is much more than anticipated; lots of this is due to the batteries that power the stations running down. I hope they sort it out; people are going to be furious if the program suddenly disappears, and I'll be a bit miffed myself.