How Will You Use Bike-Share? New Trip Planner Lets You Find Out

Citi Bike will make it a lot quicker to get from Stuy Town to Penn Station. Image: CiBi.me

Pretty much anywhere you go within the bike-share service area, you’ll be within a few blocks of a bike-share station. There’s probably a station around the corner from your office. Odds are, it’ll be a boon for any of those tricky diagonal trips that aren’t well-served by the subway.

To find out exactly how long it’ll take to get around New York on bike-share, there’s now a new online tool: CiBi.me (disclosure: the site was designed by OpenPlans, Streetsblog’s parent organization). Plug in your origin and destination and the site will identify the nearest bike-share stations and map you a route between them. A triangular slider lets riders prioritize faster, flatter, or safer routes.

I played around with the site this afternoon and I’m increasingly convinced that bike-share is going to transform the way New Yorkers get around. You can’t beat the train for a trip straight up Eighth Avenue, but for many trips, bike-share is going to be the go-to way to get from A to B. A trip from the middle of Stuy Town to Penn Station, shown above, would take only 16 minutes, according to the site.

Play around with the site and let us know: For the trips you take regularly, will bike-share come out on top?

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