CitiBike at midday

I work downtown where CitiBike is heavily concentrated, so I decided that a lunchtime ride would be the best time to take out a bike.  Because its coverage area does not include upper Manhattan, I have not used the system since an initial trial run after its launch last summer.

The racks near office buildings fill up during the day, so checking out a bike was effortless.  I appreciated the little reminders on the handlebars, which are helpful to frequent and infrequent riders alike.  The bikes allow the rider to sit comfortably upright with good visibility (unlike the typical road bike) and the step-through design makes mounting and dismounting easy.  I find them well-balanced and easy to maneuver at low speed, which is essential in city traffic to avoid putting one's foot down constantly.

I began on the South Street bike path, which was a bit difficult to access because the situation in front of the Governor's Island ferry terminal is always a bit chaotic.  There is no sidewalk or bike path in front, and pedestrians and cyclists attempt to squeeze together near the edge as motorists accelerate past onto the FDR Drive.  Once I was on the path, riding was quite pleasant.  I encountered a few pedestrians walking on the path, but I just went around them.  There were a few locations where the path abruptly ended because of construction.  Some had better-marked detours than others did.

When I reached Montgomery Street, I wanted to turn left so I pulled off to the right and waited for the light to change, not entirely certain whether I was doing it correctly.  An NYPD van came zooming out of the DOT parking lot on Pier 36 and I felt like a sitting duck.  It passed me without incident.

I found an empty rack on Henry & Grand and deposited my bicycle, feeling as though I had done a service to the community.  I walked a few blocks before finding another rack with only one working bike, thus negating my contribution to the neighborhood.  It was a warm day and plenty of people were riding bikes, but I saw no one on a CitiBike until I reached the business district again.  (Clearly, the peak flow is from the residential Lower East Side toward job-dense areas.)  On Water Street, I encountered a red light every block or two; I think that encouraging cycling will require traffic signal timing to take into account the convenience of bicyclists and not only motor vehicle throughput.  Another possible solution would be to allow bicyclists to proceed after yielding to pedestrians (the "Idaho stop"), which has been implemented in at least a few cities.

My lunchtime ride was fun and allowed me to venture beyond the range of my usual lunchtime walk.  Perhaps I should join simply for that reason.  The ability to grab a bike spontaneously has a lot of appeal and I know it would be useful to me on a daily basis if the system covered most of Manhattan.

As I witnessed, a challenge that all bikeshare systems face to some extent is unbalanced demand, which is typically dealt with by redistributing bicycles with bicycle trailers, trucks or vans.  Over the long term, this can be addressed by balancing residential and commercial development across the city, which has the added benefit of making more efficient use of the transportation system as a whole (trains, buses and roadways too).  Aside from bicycle availability, some people worry about helmets not being supplied or required but I think that is the wrong focus.  Making it safer and easier to bicycle has attracted people back to the streets, and the resulting "safety in numbers" has made everyone more safe.