Citi Bike Five Years In
A little over five years ago I stopped writing in this space on any regular basis. And at that time there wasn’t a single Citi Bike station to be found. The groundwork for the program had been laid with hundreds of public workshops, meetings with community groups, elected officials, site drawings, and a crew, including myself, that had been hired to get the program up and running. But the first stroke hadn’t yet been pedaled.
That didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty of controversy. In the year leading up to the program’s launch the New York Post called bike lanes a “cancer”, and called Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan, the leaders behind this innovative new public-private partnership, liars. Reporters, the New Yorkers they interviewed, and even the City Comptroller, speculated that bike share would lead to mass fatalities, lawsuits, gridlocked traffic. It was postulated that Citi Bike would somehow simultaneously gentrify and the begrime our city. One particularly scenic rant from a member of the WSJ editorial board called Citi Bike the product of the “totalitarians running the government of this city.”
People said no one would ride a bike in New York City and that anyone who would ride a bike in New York City already had one and didn’t want to have to share.It didn’t get much easier once we launched.
There were very well-documented twists (glitchy software) and turns (lawsuits from angry coop boards) and more drama (near-bankruptcy) than you would ever believe would have been possible for something that, at the end of the day, was just bikes. But it was much, much more.
Even as we struggled through some rookie mistakes, we were breaking ridership records nearly daily as more and more people used the service. By the end of our first month we had 50,000 Annual Members, and the blue bikes had served over a half-million trips.And, perhaps even more importantly, we were reshaping the way that people thought about bicycling. We had transformed biking from recreation or the realm of bike messengers and the terminally hip into the newest layer of public transit in one of the biggest and most complex cities on the planet.
Ridership has skyrocketed since we launched from a half million trips per month to over 1.7 million trips per month in peak riding season.This is still a work in progress of course. Citi Bike has done a tremendous job reaching out to invite more New Yorkers to join with their discount programs and on-the-ground work in lower income communities across their service area, and in doing so, inspired copycat programs across the country. But there is still more to be done. So what’s next? There are two roads ahead for bike share in our city.
We can build on something that works, or we look to a new, potentially discontinuous form of change. Paris took a gamble on big new, untested technology for their Velib program, and that gamble is not paying off. It’s left Paris’s world-leading bike share program crippled, a shadow of its former self.That’s not to say innovation is bad, we need to continue to innovate to get more people riding. This includes potentially taking advantage of the recent announcement that the De Blasio administration will allow pedal-assist electric bikes, which would make the technology more inviting to a wider range of New Yorkers including older and less physically fit people. In San Francisco where Motivate, the parent company of Citi Bike also operates, their newly launched e-bikes are being ridden far more frequently than their traditional bikes. And of course we need to continue to expand. The scale of Citi Bike, which seemed so massive and unbelievable just five years ago, has proven to work. In fact, it’s caused cities around the globe to rethink what’s possible. Maybe 12,000 bikes is actually just a fraction of what New York City needs.
We need to figure out how to do more, bring more of this to more places, in NYC and cities beyond. But as Paris and other cities embarking on new ways of doing this are showing, we need to do it in a way that builds wisely on both technology and business models that work.
