Friday Video: I Tried to Dethrone New York City’s Greatest Citi Bike Angel

For this week’s Friday video, Streetsblog is featuring Peter Van Pelt’s epic quest to dethrone the city’s top Citi Bike Angel. Below, you’ll find Van Pelt’s introduction to his ambitious expedition, and after that, his three-part video series in which he tries to capture the top angel’s forbidding lead.

There is a person in this city known only as NS143. They have been the number one Citi Bike Angel for as long as anyone can remember. If you don’t know what a Citi Bike Angel is: it’s someone who rebalances docks, taking bikes from full stations and riding them to empty ones. You get points. There’s a leaderboard. NS143 is always at the top of it. By a lot. I decided to find out what it would take to beat them.

On my first day, which happened to be April Fools’ Day, I rode for 15 hours and racked up 54,000 steps. By the end of it, I was still more than 100 points behind NS143. This was going to be harder than I thought.

Then, after a day, NS143 suddenly stopped riding. No one knew why. Maybe they went on vacation? But even without them in the picture, I was still battling daily against the rest of the field. Riders like LV440 and HN277. I managed to squeak into first place, but it was a grind, day after day.

I needed a different approach.

The core inefficiency in the Angel system is transit time. You ride a bike to a dock, return it, walk to the next bike and start over. Every minute spent walking is a minute not spent earning points. My solution: ride two bikes at once.

The method: ride my personal bike to a Citi Bike station, then ride the Citi Bike while holding my own bike alongside it. It was clumsy. Several people assumed I was stealing a bike. But it worked. When I dropped a bike off, I could get back to my own ride much faster, collapsing the dead time between trips. I want to be clear that I am not recommending this. At all. Ever.

There were complications: two small accidents (both my fault), three flat tires and two trips to the same bike shop on Canal Street.

The strategy worked. My points climbed fast. But just as I was starting to feel confident, NS143 reappeared. If they really had been on vacation, they returned refreshed, tan, and ready to destroy an interloper. I was thousands of points ahead, but they seemed unfazed, going on an angeling bonanza and racking up absurd numbers of points.

I spent 30 days riding and competing, through temperatures ranging from the 20s to the 90s, several rounds of April showers, and every other kind of chaos New York’s streets could throw at me.

So did I defeat NS143? Sorry. No spoilers. You’ll have to watch the videos to find out.

Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Episode 3: