Citi Yikes! Why 2-wheel biz fails
Bikes aren’t supposed to stall. Yet after years of hype and growing popularity, the city’s vaunted Citi Bike system has ground to a halt, taking with it the dream of a citywide, two-wheeled, dependable, low-cost, high-enjoyment mass transit system.
Who killed its will to live? Lazy politicians, expensive infrastructure, stubborn community leaders, outdated fealty to car culture, and a rejection of competition from innovative, dockless systems that are dying to fill areas Citi Bike doesn’t reach.
Citi Bike, which began in 2013, expanded to 10,000 bikes with 100,000 annual members taking more than 14 million rides.
An expansion of the program beyond its hipster Manhattan-Brooklyn core is essential, but it isn’t happening. Blame these villains: l Motivate: The company that operates Citi Bike is tethered to a docking system that costs more to run than newer dockless systems (which is probably why Seattle just scrapped its dock system in favor of dockless systems).
Annual Citi Bike memberships now cost $163, up from $100 in 2013. Maintenance and equipment are significant costs — not that Motivate lets anyone see its books. l The de Blasio administration: The mayor loves his SUV ride from Gracie Mansion to his Park Slope gym, but he hasn’t put public money into the clean form of commuting. No other form of transit gets more bang for the buck than bike rental — yet the mayor is doing nothing to help. Why? l So-called community leaders: Community Boards often fight the location of Citi Bike docks in their neighborhoods, ironically citing the very congestion that more cycling alleviates. If anything, such horse-and-buggy thinking reveals the need for community board reform.
One solution? Go dockless. More than a dozen companies such as Spin, Social Bicycles, Zagster and Limebike are hawking smartphone-enabled bike rental systems that could be deployed at a moment’s notice.
They’re easy: Users download an app and then track the locations of available bikes on their cell phones. If a bike is available, purchase an access code — typical rides are $1 for every half hour — unlock the bike and go. When the user parks the bike, it again shows as available to other users.
You can leave the bike anywhere, which eliminates Citi Bike’s notorious problems with docks that are either empty when you want to ride home or full when you want to drop off a bike at the end of your ride. And you can make it all the way to your destination, not just the closest dock.
Unfortunately, these companies are largely untested — and in China, dockless bikes have ended up in huge piles that look great on Instagram, but would not at Grand Central Terminal.
“Those dystopian pictures from China came about because those companies were operating with low-tech bikes,” said Ryan Rzepecki, a former city Transportation Department official who is now the CEO of the Brooklyn-based Social Bicycles, which operates systems in many small cities, campuses and New Orleans.
“But we will track the location of every bike so those kinds of pileups never happen.”
Rzepecki and his competitors also say they’ll adhere to Citi Bike’s standards — which require system maintenance, bike repairs, rebalancing and other New York necessities.
“Citi Bike has fallen behind because of expensive infrastructure and technology,” said James Moore, director of market growth for the Austin-based Spin.
“We could complement it by providing service in currently underserved areas — and do so more effectively.”
Of course, the de Blasio administration could simply subsidize Citi Bike, as San Antonio; Birmingham, Ala.; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Oklahoma City; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Portland, Ore.; Boston; Chattanooga, Tenn.; and Los Angeles do with their bike rental systems.
At the very least, the mayor should waive the $1 million in fees that Motivate pays as reimbursement for parking revenue that is supposedly lost from CitiBike docks.
Every form of public transit is subsidized by government — and it’s particularly ironic that Citi Bike is being starved even as the mayor hypes a new ferry service to the Rockaways that serves far fewer riders and costs the city about $6 per ride.
I asked Motivate to complain about that, but the company would not comment for this story, preferring to negotiate in secret.
Until then, why won’t the city work with the dockless systems? If they don’t perform well, the only losers would be the venture capitalists who are pouring money into the largely untested system.
But the potential upside for the winners — the riding public — would be huge.