Citi Bike riders routinely can't find places to dock in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood, as the docks fill up during the warmer months, stranding locals and visitors in the waterfront area.
Residents and business groups have for months told the Department of Transportation and its bike share contractor Lyft that Citi Bike is too unreliable in the subway-less neighborhood.
"I know I can’t advertise, ‘Take a Citi Bike,’ because I know they’re going to have a horrible experience," said Carly Baker-Rice a program manager at the Red Hook Business Alliance.
Bike share riders are often forced to circle the neighborhood or beyond for 20 minutes to find an open dock, racking up more charges and often ending their trips far from their destination. And even if one dock is free, many people head to Red Hook in groups, noted one local game designer.
"You see people — groups [of] sometimes three, four, five — riding around with their phones out, looking for a place to park, and having to sometimes leave the neighborhood," Matías Kalwill, who runs an arcade hall inside a Civil War-era warehouse. "It’s just 100 percent [of the time] close to zero percent availability, it’s just completely unreliable — every time."
Full or empty Citi Bike docks are a longstanding challenge for the hugely popular mode of transportation, as people fill into or leave certain neighborhoods during high commuting hours, which is why it can be hard to find a spot in Lower Manhattan after the morning rush.
Critics of Citi Bike have falsely claimed that a full bicycle share station is proof that no one's using them, but operators and experts around the world say that actually means they're very active — a case that Red Hook also proves.
Lyft can relocate bikes to empty docks and free up spaces, a process known as rebalancing, but a recent comptroller report found an 80 percent decline in those efforts and that the city was not doing enough to hold its operator accountable.
DOT can fine Lyft if docks remain full or empty for more than an hour on weekdays from 8 a.m.–8 p.m., or more than two hours overnight on any day. However those rebalancing requirements aren't in effect during the day time on weekends — the busy times for Red Hook visitors.
Unlike other parts of the city, Red Hook has fewer reliable forms of transportation to get around.
"Sometimes [Citi Bike] is the only way to get out of the neighborhood or arrive, and it turns out it’s not even that," said Kalwill.
On a recent summer weekend, several riders arriving at the full docks on Van Brunt Street told Kalwill they had trouble finding a spot.
"I’m trying to go to IKEA and the buses weren’t working," one rider coming from Borough Hall told Kalwill in an interview. "I’m a Citi Bike member and I thought Citi Bikes would be easier, but apparently not."
Another rider seen coming from the closest subway stop at Smith and Ninth Streets on the far side of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Gowanus, said he had been searching for a spot for 15 minutes and worried he would be late for a lunch date as a result.
"This is the third dock I've been to where there's no parking spots," the rider said. "I'd like to park and just chill, but I don't know. … I might be late to my date"
Another rider can be seen slowly riding around while checking their phone, likely for any available docks in the background:
The business alliance met with DOT's bike share team in early May to flag the issue, since local mom-and-pop shops rely heavily on the summer tourism dollars, but Baker-Rice said Lyft was not easily compelled to do a better job.
"They know about the problem," she said. "Red Hook is a different use case than Midtown, Downtown, or the Mets stadium. You should be able to deploy people because it is a weekend thing. It shouldn’t conflict with those other duties."
The ride share company asserted that it gives extra rebalancing attention to Red Hook, but also cited the neighborhood's remote geography as a challenge to keep slots free.
The neighborhood's 20 stations log some 13,000 trips a month, with hotspots on Van Brunt and Columbia streets, according to a recent DOT analysis of the neighborhood. The area also has an above-average rate of people who bike and walk to work, at 27 percent — nearly three times the city average of 11 percent, according to the Census.
Red Hook's Citi Bike ridership has grown faster at 32 percent this summer than the city average increase of 29 percent, according to a Lyft spokesperson. The company said Red Hook gets 5 percent of the relocations, despite its docks making up just 0.5 percent of the system, the rep added.
"As we have in previous summers, we’ve been dedicating outsized rebalancing resources to Red Hook to improve availability," said Jordan Levine. "We continue to closely monitor the neighborhood’s ridership patterns so we can best allocate rebalancing resources to meet demand."
A larger share of people end their rides than start them in Red Hook — that difference is larger than in any other neighborhood — and Lyft has also had to manage increasing demands in north Brooklyn and Queens due to the G train shutdown in recent months, the company rep said.
Red Hook does not have a subway stop and its bus lines routinely get clogged in traffic, which has become even worse thanks to the influx of last-mile delivery warehouses and the arrival of massive cruise ships.
There is an NYC Ferry stop that's at the far end of the neighborhood at Atlantic Basin, but the waterborne system only runs about every half hour and ends before 10 p.m.
Locals have pushed for a bus to Manhattan for decades, and transit officials were eyeing a possible connector in the lead up to the congestion pricing plan that Gov. Hochul stalled. Kalwill said improving Citi Bike would be an easy way to make the neighborhood easier to get to in the meantime.
"This is actually the lowest hanging fruit to offer an immediate relief on our strained transportation options," he said.
DOT declined to comment.
