Manhattan’s now the Borough of Citi Bikes

Every neighborhood in Manhattan now has Citi Bike docks — and the network is now the world’s largest bike-sharing service outside China and Taiwan, city officials said Wednesday.

With the debut of Citi Bike’s newest station at Nagle Ave. and Thayer St. in Inwood, the rental service “will now extend from the Battery in lower Manhattan to 220th St. at the tip of Manhattan, covering the entire island,” said Ed Pincar, the Department of Transportation’s Manhattan commissioner.

The expansion also means Citi Bike now has 20,357 bicycles on city streets and 41,763 docks where they can be parked. That makes the system slightly bigger than Velib, Paris’ public bike-sharing network, which has 17,251 bikes and 41,464 docks, according to data shared by Lyft, which owns Citi Bike.

“Surpassing Velib is a testament to our hundreds of thousands of dedicated riders for making Citi Bike one of the most successful and beloved systems in the world,” said Citi Bike general manager Laura Fox.

Only Taipei, Taiwan, and the Chinese cities of Hangzhou, Wuhan and Weifang have larger bike-sharing networks, the Lyft data shows.

Citi Bike is expected to grow even further in the coming years. When Lyft bought Citi Bike in 2018, the company announced it would invest $100 million into the system and grow the system to 40,000 bikes by the end of 2023.

Lyft filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission in December show the company has invested roughly $40 million of the promised money so far. Fox said the rest would be invested by the deadline.

The Citi Bike network now extends across four boroughs, with its footprint reaching as far south as Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The service is also up and running in the South Bronx and parts of western Queens.

The growing network is expected to be highly used this summer as the pandemic continues to turn many New Yorkers away from mass transit.