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10 years after launch, a look at how NYC’s Citi Bike nearly failed
By
Stephen Nessen
Published May 27, 2023
Modified May 31, 2023
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Adela Loconte/Shutterstock
By
Stephen Nessen
Published May 27, 2023
Modified May 31, 2023
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Saturday marks 10 years since Citi Bike launched in New York City. The success of the now-ubiquitous blue bikes was not guaranteed when the program kicked off in May 2013.
From the start, the program saw problems: It was delayed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which damaged bikes and equipment stored in the Brooklyn Navy Yard that hadn’t even hit the road yet. Then it was plagued with technical glitches, along with opposition from businesses that didn’t want docks on their block, and residents who complained it would take away parking places.
Wall Street Journal editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz appeared on a video called “Death by Bicycle” in 2013, and warned most New Yorkers don’t want “this dreadful program.”
And still, starting with a modest 6,000 bikes at 331 stations and an initial membership of 5,000 people, it’s grown to 30,000 bikes at 1,827 stations, more than 180,000 members. Citi Bike reports last year there were 1.5 million unique riders.
Podcast producer and journalist Vanessa Quirk, who was hired by Citi Bike, will publish an oral history of the service next week. Interviews she conducted with people who helped launch Citi Bike show how precarious the program’s start was.
In the summer of 2013, there was a major data breach, and there were tech problems at the docks, she said. At the time, WNYC reported 10% of the docks weren’t working on any given day.
In the weeks after Citi Bike launched, Quirk said entire stations would run out of power — causing entire sections of bikes to spontaneously unlock. When that happened, Quirk said crews were sent scrambling to collect every loose bike.
Another time, the system that charges people went down, requiring the tech team behind the scenes to manually process every transaction.
A few weeks after it launched, then-Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson put his foot down. He gave Citi Bike 48 hours to fix a serious tech problem, Quirk said. But the tech team wasn’t even sure if it was a hardware or software issue.
Once they decided to try and update the software, they realized there was no way to upgrade the software over a cellular network, Quirk said. So, after difficult-to-translate conversations between the Montreal-based tech company that created the software and the team in New York City, they realized the docks had to be updated manually, using SD cards.
Employees of Citi Bike went to B&H and bought every SD card they sold, Quirk said. And when that wasn't enough, they hit other stores. Then they realized the work had to be done at night, to avoid disrupting users during the day, so they went on a headlamp-buying spree so people could see what they were doing.
“And so Citi Bike staff and their friends are bicycling all throughout the night, swapping out these little SD cards. They've closed down the system overnight to let them do this, and then they wait for the morning and they turn the system on and they're, you know, crossing their fingers,” Quirk said. “And it worked. It worked. So the software patch was the right patch.”
Lyft, which owns Citi Bike, confirmed the details of those accounts are accurate.
Still, 10 years later, Citi Bike has moved beyond those early hiccups, and appears to be a permanent fixture in New York City now, as reliable as the subways, as ubiquitous as the blue-and-white Greek coffee cups.
The company is planning its next expansion. New neighborhoods that are expected to get Citi Bikes this year include Prospect Lefferts Gardens, and Flatbush in Brooklyn, Jackson Heights and Corona in Queens, and Marble Hill in Upper Manhattan.
The company is also boosting its fleet with 10,000 more standard bikes and 2,000 of the so-called “next generation ebikes” — shinier, speedier bikes. That would bring the total fleet to 40,000 by the end of 2024.
A previous version of this story incorrectly named the deputy mayor at the time of Citi Bike's launch. It was Howard Wolfson. A previous version of this story also incorrectly cited the number of initial memberships for the program. There were 5,000.
This story was updated after a spokesperson from Lyft clarified the details of a computer malfunction.
Tagged
new york city
transportation
Stephen Nessen
Stephen Nessen covers transportation. Since 2008 he has reported on everything from Occupy Wall Street, the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, Hurricane Sandy, to Trump’s campaign for president. His transportation reporting has taken him everywhere from the MTA’s secret Rail Control Center to the gleaming subways of Seoul. Got a tip? Email [email protected].
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