This rider has gone full cycle
Nolita man hits all 1,577 Citi Bike docks
He’s been around the dock. A Manhattan man has become the first person to visit every Citi Bike station in the Big Apple, Jersey City and Hoboken — all 1,577 of them — often riding until past 4 a.m. to complete the feat.
Why did Eric Finkelstein, 33, of Nolita, put in what he admits was an “essentially ludicrous amount of effort” to accomplish his task?
“I have this thing for completing stuff,” he told The Post.
An avid player of the locationbased game Pokémon Go who is admittedly “obsessed” with frequent-flyer programs, Finkelstein said he once “literally booked an around-the-world flight to catch some of the regional Pokémon.”
Finkelstein — a former competitive pingpong player who has appeared at international tournaments and trained in China — also holds the Guinness record for longest table-tennis serve.
Finkelstein had already visited 407 Citi Bike stations in the course of his riding when, in early August, he noticed a new feature in the bicycle-share service’s app, City Explorer. The page displays a map showing where customers have and have not rented or returned one of the blue bikes.
Exactly three weeks later, after cycling through more than a few nights, he had visited 1,100 additional Citi Bike stations, making him the first rider to hit them all.
After making it to the last dock — in Hoboken — he got dinner and met a friend there for a drink to celebrate.
He has clocked in just under 600 hours in the saddle and completed more than 4,000 rides since he joined the program in 2016, Citi Bike app screenshots show.
His Citi Bike account actually shows 1,609 stations visited, since some have been deactivated or moved since 2016.
Finkelstein said he was struck by how many sidewalk cookouts he biked past in The Bronx and the rest of the outer boroughs — as well as the number of open fire hydrants.
“I feel like I don’t see that very often in Manhattan. When I was in The Bronx, I saw that constantly. For the car, a minor nuisance, but as a biker, I got soaked,” he said.
A “side benefit” of the ride: getting to check some outer-borough eats off his list, including Puerto Rican-style pork at Cuchifritos, an eatery in The Bronx’s Fordham section that he had seen on Anthony Bourdain’s CNN show “Parts Unknown.”
One thing which surprised the health-care information-technology consultant: He had only one near miss with a vehicle, when a parked car made a sudden U-turn as he passed, forcing him to swerve.
And not a single fellow New Yorker was “openly hostile.”
All that riding around has left him with a few gripes for Citi Bike’s parent company, Lyft.
He notes that some neighborhoods perennially have no bikes and others no docks, or that the app will show a single open dock at a station, only for the rider to arrive and find it broken. But he recognizes “rebalancing” bikes to be a difficult task.
Citi Bike confirmed Finkelstein to be the first rider to visit every station.
“We’ve seen an uptick in the number of stations people are visiting since we’ve launched the City Explorer feature, but Eric is the first to get to all of them, an impressive achievement,” Laura Fox, Citi Bike general manager at Lyft, said in a statement.
“We’ll be adding hundreds more stations in the near future, and we challenge him to keep up his 100 percent status as we continue to grow our network!”