Citi Bike Is Amazing. Citibank Should Pay for Every New Yorker's Membership
hellgatenyc.com
hellgatenyc.com
then the city could place these docks on literally every block and companies could provide the bikes and service to rebalance the bikes on the docks as necessary. that environment would result in more variety of bikes (cargo, electric, tandem, etc) with more frequency and cheaper costs, as they wouldn't have to be concerned about political nonsense on getting the docks setup to begin with.
If you don't have a membership, it now costs more than a subway ride to have a bike for a half an hour. It's like they have an offering for tourists (high price per use) and an offering for people who use it all the time (membership), but they don't really have an option for the once in a while type of person.
I think that might be our different mindsets at work here. I ride transit when I must, but when I need or want to go somewhere my first thought is, "I want to do this on a bike. Can I do this on a bike?"
I do use Citi Bike mainly as a transit replacement when I visit. I'd say I make about four major displacements a day when I visit and use Citi Bike for part or all of them where possible. Sometimes it saves me part of the fare, like, I will take Citi Bike to Grand Central to ride Metro North, or take Citi Bike to a PATH station to cross into NJ.
There are major use cases if you frequent/live in a neighborhood that is just outside the comfort zone for regularly using transit. A major portion of East Village is like that. From a purely "does this save me a lot of time and/or money" standpoint, Citi Bike does not always come out on top, but it does come out on top for quite a lot of people as you mentioned.
One major benefit to me though is that having the membership reduces the friction of deciding to use a bike, by a lot. It makes riding a bike into a very obvious, low-cost recreation/exercise option and inspires me to go out and be active when the weather is nice. And it makes me motivated to find excuses to get out and ride more, like crossing the major bridges, checking out the waterfront greenways, or getting involved in group rides or other meetups related to my hobbies. The fact that biking is just more fun and satisfying than taking public transit makes all the outings that it enables more fun and satisfying by extension too.
> Citi pays $20 million a year for the rights to Citi Field, and that's just regular signage on a stadium where men play the world's most boring sport
Citi Field gives Citi an exclusive, branded venue to take clients and cut deals. You’re not going to win M&A business with a free bike.
Point is: there are single line items that justify a multimillion dollar spend at Citi Field. I can think of no analog for bikes.
Hosted on a non not-for profit website.
With content that's not Creative Commons.
Bemoaning not sharing profits.
That's based on how much value the buyer is getting and how much money they have. According to the article, value is high and Citi has gobs of money. Therefore, the seller needs to negotiate harder. Negotiating hard to achieve a win-win is the most capitalistic outcome you could wish for.
"I want this for free" -> I'd like this to be accessible to lower income citizens, increase usage of cycles that improves health in general and lowers our city's impact on the climate.
Personally, this is literally the first time I've thought of Citibank in connection with Citibike in years. I think there might be a ceiling on the brand-awareness benefits of these roaming billboards.
Just because some big bank can afford to pay for your bike ride, doesn't make you entitled to ask them to do it.
> membership with unlimited rides costs $205
Why is the cost so high and who profits from it? More bicycle memberships would mean less congestion and pollution as well as healthier population.
My experience in European cities is that the annual pass costs around €30.
Members use the bikes heavily, which requires maintenance, and people who drive around Manhattan taking bikes from popular parking spots and bringing them to popular departure spots, and recharging electric bikes. This is very imbalanced, EG everyone wants to go to Grand Central in the morning and leave from there in the evening.
In addition to the marginal cost from each member, Citi bike has high fixed costs, like maintaining the bike docks. My guess is that even at $205 for a membership Lyfy doesn't profit much.
I wonder if the report you linked to is somehow broken ("There were 18 active Citi Bike stations at the end of March.") but 2 trips per bike per day sounds comparably low - I guess an annual report would be more useful.
> everyone wants to go to Grand Central in the morning and leave from there in the evening.
Sounds problematic (and weird) to me, like they have attracted only a specific type of potential users.
How would having more casual users put less strain on the system?
Lowering the price to $30/year isn't going to cause the people who now pay $200+/year to stop using it, so all those new casual users would be in addition to those already using it.
Whether this is feasible depends on the actual numbers, but at least it does work in other cities.
From the left, theres this push that it has to be free or abnormally cheap. The problem with this notion is 1) tons of people ride the subway who can afford to pay 2-5x as much. 2) We know this because subways are competing with Uber which costs $20-50 3) We already subsidize 50% discount metrocards for elderly, disabled, poor, students, etc, etc 4) People just do NOT value things that are free
Transit is already in a big enough budget hole, absurdly cheap, and competing against much more expensive competition.
The problem is not that it needs to be cheaper, the problem is it needs to be more convenient/frequent/safe/clean/etc.
The race to $0 will only make these options worse.
Yes, tons of people ride the subway and also ride Uber for some trips when its too late (safety)/trains are too infrequent (service)/theres delays (service)/for comfort/etc.
Two: the Q and 7 extension. The T is on the drawing board [1].
The 2nd phase up to 125th probably takes another 10 years and $20B if we are lucky.
The final leg down to Hanover Square will be a race against FiDi sinking into the sea in the 2100s.
You asked for our confidence “in the MTA expanding service in [our] lifetime[s].” Ten years is within our lifetimes.
In 2003 the subway fare was $2.00. (This is $3.32 in 2023 inflated dollars) In 2023 it is $2.75.
In 2003 NYC minimum wage was $5.15. Subway far was or 23 minutes of minimum wage labor.
In 2023 NYC minimum wage is $15, and shortly going up to $17. Subway fare is 11 minutes of minimum wage labor.
What really caught me off guard with the rise of ride hailing apps was how many of my GenZ coworkers were using them frequently for commuting.
Tons of people check out books from the public library when they could easily afford spending $1 per book.
Tons of people send their kids to public schools when they could easily afford paying $1,000 per year. And we know people will spend $30,000/year to send those kids to private school.
Tons of people will use public parks when they could easily afford a $1 entrance fee. And people will pay for private parks, like Gramercy Park in NYC.
People value public libraries, and public schools, and public parks. (And a lot of people value the right to vote, even though they pay nothing for it.)
I therefore don't see that your argument holds much weight.
Ah, more “tax the rich” so I have some freebies nonsense.
“All those billboards, roaming constantly, for just $10 million! They've also literally inserted a bank's name into the mouths and lives of countless New Yorkers and tourists. It's in the lexicon! How much is that worth? Citibank is getting an incredible deal, and surely they know it.”
Seriously, how much? It’s probably more than $10mm. But 5x that, into perpetuity? What business are Citi winning that’s worth that much?
Citi Field regularly broadcasts games nationally.
> there is a competitive market for this kind of sponsorship that should allow the dept of transport to extract more value
This would have been a more compelling article: who would be willing to pay more than Citi.
It’s not just up to Citibank, though, as the bikes have Lyft (I believe?) as an owner and whatever contractual agreements with the city. Further, there would still need to be some sort of deposit system to prevent casual theft/neglect.
I think the real message is that people really like these bike programs. So maybe we should pay for them from taxes and instead of adverts for banks we can write "your taxes at work" or "woo! socialism" or whatever on the side of the bikes.
Furthermore the electric "bicycles" are actually just electric motorcycles with auxiliary pedals and as such should require a license to drive.
99% of pedestrian deaths result from collisions with cars, not bikes [1].
> electric "bicycles" are actually just electric motorcycles with auxiliary pedals and as such should require a license to drive
99.9% of “motor vehicle collisions that resulted in injuries [in 2018] were caused by e-bikes” [2]. A link is provided to the data; I doubt they’ve materially increased.
I share your frustration with bikers ignoring traffic rules. But dangerous bikers, even e-bikers, pale in consequence to cars.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nycdot-pedestrian...
[2] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/04/18/damn-lies-and-statist...
An "e-bike" that is going 25mph and running red lights without anyone doing any pedaling at all is a motorcycle end of story and they should be banned or require a license.
Not whataboutism to compare the substitute folks would turn to if we banned bike lanes as you suggest, but whatever. Two pedestrians died due to bike collisions in 2021. How many emissions did New York City bikers collectively save us that year?
> An "e-bike" that is going 25mph and running red lights without anyone doing any pedaling at all is a motorcycle end of story
We don’t ticket motorcycles for running red lights either! You’re upset about traffic enforcement. Not any particular mode. If anything, that you’re noticing the bikes while remaining alive says something about their relative safety.
As a cyclist, I’ve had plenty of close calls with bad drivers. I’ve also witnessed insane behavior by cyclists that obviously led to the subsequent vehicular entanglement [0].
On balance, cars cause more issues for bikes than the other way around. But a subgroup of cyclists are not innocent here, and plenty are directly at fault for their own injuries or for forcing cars into dangerous situations.
All of this to say: this isn’t a bikes vs. cars problem, it’s a city planning and transportation infrastructure problem.
- [0] Like the cyclist that turned the wrong way around a traffic circle to go the wrong way down a one way street and was surprised to land on the hood of my car as I made my way the correct way (and only legal route) around the circle. I was equally surprised because the center of the circle was filled with tall plants. If he’d been going faster, things could have been much worse for him. It would have counted as a vehicular accident but the cops and insurance folks were 100% in agreement that the cyclist did the dumb thing here. The point of this anecdote: if that cyclist died, it’d be “another cyclist killed by a car”, but that’s hardly the whole story. Encounters with cars have a high risk of being fatal. That does not mean that drivers are always the issue.
The point I’m trying to make here is that countering an argument against bikes with “cars kill people, bikes don’t” is oversimplifying the problem much like “ban all the bikes” is oversimplifying the problem.
Neither of these positions moves the conversation forward and both of these positions discard a wide spectrum of complexity.
If we are to take this issue seriously, it involves infrastructure improvements to make cyclists safer, citations against cyclists who are obviously endangering others, and hopefully movement away from the need for cars to begin with.
Focusing on the binary version of this gets us nowhere.
1) The cyclists that tend to get noticed are the cyclists who behave like assholes.
2) Cars often don’t see us, usually because the driver just isn’t paying attention, and this leads to aggressively defensive behavior in traffic. Basically, if you don’t notice me, there’s a much higher chance that I’ll die, so I’ll do things to get noticed.
For me, that means wearing visible gear, positioning myself strategically at intersections, etc.
For the cyclists you describe, it means doing stupidly dangerous stuff.
The behavior should not be excused, but the solution isn’t as simple as more fines. The problem is a product of the poor bicycle infrastructure in most places and the ever-increasing hostility between drivers and “problem” cyclists.
Obvious disclaimer that I realize the specific factors of NYC vs. Chicago make my cycling experience only partially relevant, but as someone who has spent quite a bit of time chatting with various cycling communities, the problems mostly transcend geography, with degrees of seriousness depending on how well a particular city handles bike traffic.