Streetsblog New York City

New York City Housing Authority tenants are now eligible to sign up for discounted Citi Bike memberships in a program that was first announced last month. Joining the service costs NYCHA residents $60 per year, $35 less than the standard price. All 29 NYCHA properties in the Citi Bike service area have at least one station a block away or closer.

Tenants must use their NYCHA account number and date of birth to qualify for the discount. Citi Bike is open to anyone age 16 or older, although it requires a credit or debit card to sign up for the service.

Bike-share systems across the country have seen low ridership among communities of color and poorer residents, especially those without access to credit cards or bank accounts. In Washington, DC, Capital Bikeshare has partnered with a program that connects low-income people to banking institutions, while Boston subsidizes memberships for low-income residents through its public health commission.

In Minneapolis, one of the biggest barriers to low-income users looking to purchase a daily or weekly pass — a credit card “authorization hold” to safeguard against theft — was reduced and eventually eliminated after bike theft turned out not to be a problem. In New York, Citi Bike will require a $101 authorization hold.

To further lower the barriers to using bike-share, Citi Bike has partnered with credit unions serving low-income populations, known as Community Development Credit Unions, to offer a discount to credit union members. So far, Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union and NYU Federal Credit Union are participating.

Update: “We plan to do at least one outreach meeting/helmet fitting a week at a NYCHA property in the service area all summer long,” DOT spokesperson Seth Solomonow said to Streetsblog via e-mail, adding that there have been bike-share informational events at Farragut Houses, Smith Houses, Elliott Houses, and other NYCHA properties in English, Chinese and Spanish beginning in 2011.

Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer is no stranger to bicycling. Now he's joined Citi Bike. Will his colleagues join him? Photo: Transportation Alternatives

DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced bike-share’s Memorial Day launch date at last week’s budget hearing, but Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer had some news of his own: He had joined thousands of New Yorkers in becoming a Citi Bike member.

“I want to say proudly I am one of the 8,000 people who have signed up for bike-share,” Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer said, joining Brooklyn Council Members Steve Levin and Brad Lander in becoming a bike-share member. Like Lander, Van Bramer’s district isn’t even located in Citi Bike’s initial service area. “We really want bike-share in western Queens,” Van Bramer said.

In the week since Van Bramer’s announcement, the program’s membership rolls have grown from 8,000 to more than 10,000. Are any other council members awaiting key fobs in the mail?

Streetsblog has inquired with other council members in the service area to see if they are Citi Bike members or plan to join. Letitia James told Streetsblog via e-mail that she plans on becoming a member.

We’re waiting on word from Gale Brewer, Margaret Chin, Dan Garodnick, Jessica Lappin, Rosie Mendez, Christine Quinn, and Albert Vann. We’ll let you know if we hear any updates.

Update: Council Member Chin’s office said that while she is “very supportive of bike-share,” she will not be joining because does not know how to ride a bike, although she plans to learn how to ride in the future.

Update 2: Council Member Garodnick is not a Citi Bike member and does not know if he will join in the future, according to a spokesperson.

The wisdom in Matt Flegenheimer’s bike-share NIMBY opus comes across nicely in the kicker:

Nearby, on University Place, Alfred Haffenden, 71, sat between a bike station and his table of available consumer items — two Al Franken books, a baby-care advice book, and VHS copies of “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Wuthering Heights.”

The stations would be a change, he said, but who would want to live in a New York that refused to try something new?

“There’s not much you can do about that type, my friend,” he said, leaning toward the kiosk. “Some people can’t see. Some people just don’t want to see.”

But long before readers get to that point, if they ever do, they’ll absorb the headline (“Bike Sharing? Sure. The Racks? No Way.”) and the lede:

Citi Bike isn't enough of an adrenaline rush for Simone Weichselbaum. This bodes well for its success. Photos: Daily News (left, right)

Daily News reporter Simone Weichselbaum likes her bikes light and fast. The self-proclaimed “proud bike snob who is rarely without her SE Draft steel-frame fixie” said in 2009 that “biking here can be a death sentence,” and that bike lanes are “battle zones.”

So it’s no surprise that Citi Bike — featuring a 45-pound three-speed with balloon tires and a low center of gravity — wasn’t her cup of tea. What she intended as a scathing review of the bike-share two-wheelers might turn out to be their best endorsement yet.

“The seat is wide and spongy. The handlebars are extra wide. The tires are fat,” Weischelbaum wrote, as if it were a bad thing. If even the Daily News’s resident bike daredevil couldn’t manage to do much beyond an easy pedal on a Citi Bike, it’s hard to see how the unfounded nightmare visions of “hell on wheels” conjured by the paper’s editorial board could come true.

To be fair, Weichselbaum did run into a common problem when she tried to take the bike out of its dock, but only because she was doing it the wrong way. “The thing wouldn’t move. I kept yanking on the handlebars. Nothing,” she wrote. If she had followed instructions printed on the bike and lifted by the seat instead of the handlebars, she could have saved herself the trouble.

Bicycling should be for everyone, not just people who keep a fixie in their apartment for a high-speed, high-stakes experience. For those just looking to get around town safely, cheaply and quickly, Weichselbaum’s review shows that Citi Bike should be exactly what they need.

Cross-posted from Brooklyn Spoke

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen a few of my rather straightforward tweets in which I repeat some of the main criticisms of bike-share offered by NIMBYs as they fight tooth and nail to move Citi Bike stations from their blocks. These tweets are typically followed by pictures that belie that very criticism, showing that the problem they’re predicting bike share will cause already exists and is caused by cars. Yet somehow the NIMBY logic doesn’t extend from removing bike-share stations to also removing car parking.

Here are some of the typical NIMBY complaints about bike share stations, accompanied by pictures. If you have a response or an addition, please leave it in the comments. I’ll even send an “I [BIKE] BKLYN” button to anyone who can come up with a fair criticism of bike share that doesn’t also apply to cars.

1. Bike share stations pollute the street environment with brightly colored corporate advertising.

2. Bike share stations do not belong in historic, landmark blocks, some dating back to the 19th Century.

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The headline from today’s City Council transportation committee oversight hearing was Janette Sadik-Khan’s announcement that the official launch date for Citi Bike is Memorial Day. Meanwhile, for Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca, it was another occasion to flail at bikes and defend cheap parking under the guise of holding a budget hearing.

Council Members Vacca and Recchia want to make sure that cyclists are a revenue source for the city — and that the parking status quo is maintained. Photos: NYC Council

Sadik-Khan kicked off the hearing with prepared testimony on the agency’s $732.9 million 2014 executive budget, including everything from public plazas and Select Bus Service upgrades to bridge repair and street lights.

But the bulk of council members’ questions revolved around bikes. The first came from an incredulous Vacca, who challenged Sadik-Khan’s statement that more than 70 percent of New Yorkers support bike-share. ”How do you know that?” he asked, before she pointed him to polling from Quinnipiac University.

After asking about the $9.4 million budgeted for bicycle network expansion — 80 percent of which is covered by federal funds — and questioning whether a safety plan for the Grand Concourse should include bike lanes (Sadik-Khan noted that the street already has them), Vacca came to the heart of his questioning: How can the city get more revenue from bike riders?

“I didn’t see any projections in your budget based on revenue from the commercial cycling program,” Vacca said, referencing a package of laws the City Council passed last year that create new mandates for delivery cyclists and their employers. But it’s not just food delivery cyclists that Vacca sees as a revenue source. “When will we see revenue into the city’s coffers from bike-share?” he asked.

“[The Office of Management and Budget] does not include funding for new programs,” Sadik-Khan said. “They need to have a year to understand what the budget impact is going to be.” She added that any bike-share profits will be split evenly between the city and system operator Alta.

Finance committee chair Domenic Recchia, meanwhile, said he’s concerned about reduced parking revenue as a result of Citi Bike stations being installed on the street. ”Less than one percent of parking spots were removed,” Sadik-Khan said, adding that not all on-street bike-share stations are in formerly metered spaces. ”The contract provides that the operator has to make up the lost revenue to the city.”

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At city council hearing, DOT Commissioner Sadik-Khan announces that Citi Bike will launch on May 27.

— Streetsblog New York (@StreetsblogNYC) May 9, 2013

It’s official. America’s largest public bike system will launch Monday, May 27, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced at a City Council transportation committee hearing this morning. According to the Citi Bike twitter feed, the first week of service will be available for annual members only, then on June 2 weekly and daily passes will go on sale. (Here’s a look at the initial system map and the pricing structure, if you need a refresher.)

So in less than three weeks, the wait will be over. The empty-dock phase will give way to the real transportation system phase, and New Yorkers will see what bike-share is all about.

We’ll fill in any additional details about today’s announcement as they become available.

Update: To get a member key in time for launch day, you need to sign up by May 17. In a statement, Sadik-Khan said that more than 8,000 annual members have signed up so far.

Photo: Ben Fried

On Fox 5′s Good Day program with Rosanna Scotto and Greg Kelly (son of Ray) this morning, Streetsblog columnist Steve Vaccaro skillfully, smoothly debated Jeffrey Barr, the lawyer representing Manhattan’s anti-bike-share NIMBYs. Steve’s performance speaks for itself. All I have to say is, put this man on TV more.

Okay, I also have to say, Rosanna Scotto needs to do her homework on the number of New Yorkers who own cars, the spatial efficiency of different transportation modes, and how NYC allocates curb space. About three minutes in, Scotto says, “I think what some people are concerned about is that we’re kind of dumping parking spots and everything for 3 percent of the population, while the other people are forced to find other ways to park and get around the city.” Of course, in Manhattan, where Barr’s clients live, only 23 percent of households own cars, but most of the curb is devoted to storing their vehicles. After bike-share launches, New York City’s car owners will still be hogging a percentage of public curb space that’s vastly out of proportion to their share of the population.

Setting aside the sheer entitlement it must take to sue the city over a public amenity installed on the public right of way, let’s just appreciate the irony of the complaints coming from anti-bike-share litigants.

Apartment owners at 99 Bank Street and a few other tony buildings are under the impression that locating a public bike station in front of their residence is going to depress their property values:

“The placement of such a massive futuristic structure … (and) dropping … a slab in front of (their) 100 year old landmark building located on an historic street in a landmarks protected district is offensive to the public and residents,” the owners’ lawyer, Jeffrey Barr, says in court papers.

Barr said the residents decided to sue the corporate sponsor, Citibank, and the vendors running the program, Alta Bicycle Share and NYC Bike Share, because they are in charge of the program and in position to make a change.

He said they also are responsible when the building’s value drops because the bike racks attract garbage and animal waste and impede pedestrian and vehicular traffic, forcing bikers to ride on the narrow sidewalks to escape the narrow bumpy street.

Meanwhile, Matt Chaban at Crain’s writes that people who deal with apartment sales for a living are expecting the opposite effect:

Residential brokers are also buying into the program. “I deal mostly with clients in their late 20s to mid-30s who are very physically active,” Douglas Elliman agent Zakery Risinger said. “Being close to one of the stations will be a huge selling point for apartments.”

So the bike-share litigants are fighting something that’s not only going to enrich transportation options for themselves and their neighbors, it’s also probably going to enrich them, period.

I didn’t get to speak at the Manhattan Community Board 2 meeting last night to discuss bike-share — I stayed outside too long kibitzing on West 11th Street, so my speaker card landed at the bottom of the stack. Here’s what I would have said:

Image: front cover of "Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Glenna Lang and Marjorie Wunsch, on Amazon

I live in CB 1, on Duane Street, but my first New York apartments were in or just outside CB 2, on West 15th Street and Minetta Street. My kids were born across the street at (now shuttered) St. Vincent’s Hospital. My two sisters lived a few blocks away. And there were timeless evenings at the Village Gate, the Village Vanguard, etc. So there’s a lot of Greenwich Village in me.

I don’t quite know what to make of the uproar and upset from so many of my neighbors tonight. I think I’ll try to channel Jane — Jane Jacobs, the immortal author-activist who led the insurrection that stopped the Lower Manhattan Expressway and whose “Death and Life of Great American Cities” laid the intellectual foundation for today’s livable streets movement. Jane famously lived at 555 Hudson, a stone’s throw from where we’re meeting tonight. I met her just once, in Toronto, in 1990 or 1991, where Jane had moved in 1968, the year I moved in. Obviously, I didn’t know her well. But I’ve studied her life and her work enough to venture what Jane might want to tell us.

To start, I think Jane would have understood that for Citi Bike to succeed it has to be done “at scale.” So far as I know, Jane didn’t use the term “network effects,” but that idea pervades her work, as blogger Timothy B. Lee points out:

Jacobs doesn’t quite put it this way, but Great American Cities is really a treatise on the importance of network effects to urban wealth creation. The reason people flock to noisy, dirty, crowded cities like New York and Chicago is because most of the things we value are provided by other human beings, and being in a large city puts us in close proximity with many more of them.

Network effects apply to systems as well as populations: Telephone systems are based on them, since the value of your phone depends on my having one as well. Indeed, “network math” posits that while the cost of a network rises in linear proportion to the number of instruments, the network’s value rises geometrically in relation to that number. Just so, with bike-share. A Citi Bike won’t be fully useful unless there’s a full-blown network of stations where you can find a bike and then leave it at the end of the trip.

In short, without scale, forget about bike-share, Jane Jacobs the analyst might have said.

Without question, Jane Jacobs the urbanist would have wrapped bike-share in a bear hug. Jane would have relished the opportunity to always have a bike at the ready and to be unencumbered by it at her destination. She would have delighted in the sturdy, interchangeable and utterly utilitarian machines themselves. And she would have appreciated the access to cycling the system would have provided everyone — not just those fortunate enough to live within easy cycling distance of work, as Jane did, but the throngs of workers and visitors who come in from the boroughs and the suburbs.

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