Citi Bike will expand to more neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx and add stations to busy parts of the bike-share system, Mayor Adams said on Friday — a stop-gap expansion that buys the city time as it mulls how to expand into territory less politically friendly to bike infrastructure.
The new expansion appears to avoid pushing into areas where pro-car elected officials have pushed back on bike infrastructure in general — and shared micromobilitiy in particular — such as downtown Flushing and the east Bronx where the city is currently dealing with heavy backlash to shared e-scooters.
Citi Bike operator Lyft and the Department of Transportation agreed to distribute remaining uninstalled docks from a previous agreement signed under Mayor Bill de Blasio to Bay Ridge, Kensington, Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn, Kingsbridge and Norwood in the Bronx, and the area west of Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.
Lyft will also double-up on docks in busy areas where stations routinely fill up to capacity, including in midtown and downtown Manhattan, Harlem, North Brooklyn and Park Slope, according to the City Hall press release, which dubbed the latest additions "Phase 3.5."
"This Citi Bike expansion is the latest way we’re making it easier and more affordable to get around New York City, particularly for low-income New Yorkers," Adams said in a statement. "People in Brownsville and other low-income neighborhoods deserve Citi Bike access as much as any other New Yorker, and this expansion brings us closer to ensuring just that."
The expansion will be a boon for those lucky neighborhoods, but leaves out some gaps in dense areas that would do well with bike-share, such as Sunset Park Chinatown, Borough Park, Riverdale and downtown Flushing — parts of the city where officials have faced pushback and windshield perspective from locals and their representatives over basic safe street infrastructure.
Other gaps include areas where DOT has been trying out an e-scooter share program, such as Eastern Queens and the East Bronx. There lawmakers have railed against the transportation option, despite its popularity among riders, according to DOT.
Negotiations between Lyft and the DOT for a larger "phase 4" expansion remaining ongoing, a spokesperson for the tech company told Streetsblog. Adams campaigned in 2021 on directing city funding to the system to expand it faster, but he has not followed through with any actual subsidy. City funding could lower costs for riders, subsidize expansion into less dense parts of the city and improve maintenance of bikes and docks.
"It’s going to require a mayor or DOT commissioner who’s going to take on the politicians of those neighborhoods," said Jon Orcutt, the Director of Advocacy at Bike New York. "It’s very obvious that it’s drawn to avoid some areas as well to include some."
The most recent major Citi Bike expansion agreement, Phase 3, dates back to 2019 after Lyft took over the popular bike-share system from its previous operator Motivate.
Other bike-share systems in the US, like in Boston and San Francisco, receive public subsidies. Citi Bike has managed to survive so far thanks to the sponsorship from Citi Bank that provides a huge chunk of its funding.
The system — the largest in the Western Hemisphere — has been repeatedly breaking records in recent years, logging nearly 5.3 million rides in October, beating its previous monthly best the month before.
Ridership has consistently grown as the system has spread to more parts of the boroughs, even as some City Council members falsely claimed new stations in their areas were unused. Station-level data shows even the most peripheral bike-share stations see dozens of riders per day.
DOT chose the new locations in order to connect to the existing network, and based on where officials believe Citi Bike would have "the most utility" given population density and access to other mass transit, according to agency spokesperson Anna Correa.
However, for example, the addition of Bay Ridge creates a peninsula of Citi Bike's coverage area in southwest Brooklyn that leaves riders stranded if they want to go east to and from dense neighborhoods with plenty of subway connections like the borough's Chinatown or Borough Park.
That could cause issues of making sure there are enough bikes at docks throughout the system, which has been an issue at the rim of the system, Orcutt noted.
"The edge of the system always gets the worst rebalancing because the bikes can only go in one direction," said Orcutt. "The city needs to do a detailed analysis why Lyft couldn’t put bikes in Borough Park."
“I don’t buy that it’s some lower ridership area," he added.
