r/Citibike

Am i the only one who thinks citi bike is doing a bad job with the flow of bikes between stations? It seems that there is regularly no bikes at any stations around my neighborhood in the mornings and many times during the day, whereas so many other stations are flooded with no places to park..

We're paying so much for the membership and I think the one thing that they need to make sure is that you can pick up a bike and drop it off anywhere in the city.. that's the whole point.

I recently purchased an affordable foldable e-bike, and I wish I'd done it sooner. What you swap for mild convenience (not having to lock up your bike, etc.), you increasingly lose with Citibike. Here's how it's become more enshittified.

1. The price hikes!

2. The bike quality itself, since the shift to the new gray e-bikes, is much worse. Everytime I ride over a pothole or just some uneven ground, my teeth or head hurt for a bit because the bike's are built flimsily and have no shock absorption. My new bike, which is hardly top of the line, reminds me of how much better shock absorption is on real bikes.

3. The speed throttling, which the city under the new mayor ought to lift, is horrible. In reality, it actually starts at around 12 mph, which makes you average speed even lower.

Citibike's really lost it's social mission, too, with the price/speed shenanigans. If the goal is to get more people to use micromobility, that isn't helping.

Yesterday I took an e-bike home and later discovered I was charged $0. The only reason I can think of is that the original dock only had electrics, but I know they did away with this perk years ago. Has it returned? Obviously not complaining about a free commute home lol but just curious as to why I wasn’t charged. Also, I have “full assist” selected in my settings for scenarios where there are no manuals.

Within the last 6 days (less than a week) I’ve experienced 3 glitches I’ve never seen before. First one was 6 days ago, I count angel points veryyyy thoroughly and I use non e-bikes to get them so the regular bikes, I go to a dock, unlock the bike and ride it to where I’m going, that trip should’ve given me 4 points, but when I look at the app it says (trip was cancelled, pick another bike) and even in my ride history I don’t see it, so what the hell just happened? 2 days ago I unlock an ebike and start riding, 2 blocks away, the ebike suddenly STOPS working, and says (return to dock) on the little screen, and it’s a heavy ass bike when it doesn’t work regularly. Glitch 3, yesterday I unlocked another ebike. For a full 9 minutes, and it goes full speed, when I open the app it says (trip is free) I didn’t lose any ebike points and it went full speed??

I saw someone else post about the free ebike yesterday (not that I’m complaining) but now it just feels strange 3 different malfunctions within 6 days??

I’d rather just take a yellow cab to not give Lyft any money. The taxi for my occasional commute is $18 while Citibike is $12

Saw a guy take a blue bike on the ferry to Hoboken and was curious (but not enough to approach him):

1. Why would you do that when you can dock at the terminal and take another bike when you disembark?

2. Don't you get a fine for taking them across state line?

Why would anyone do that, unless they're stolen in which case they just don't care?

Just tried to unlock a bike and it seems like the app is down. This happening for anyone else?

Questions​ for the expert Bile Angels here:

If I get a 10 minute ebike credit and then use it for a short hop up a hill (say 5 minutes) is the entire 10 minute credit used for the trip, or do I maintain a bank of ebike credits?​

I read about an old bug in the system that prevented riders from using multiple ebike credits on the same ride. Has this been fixed?

Does anyone have a way to get access to a cheap membership?

For context, I'm a college student coming home and staying home in New York over the summer, and I want to use citibike to go around the city to hangout with friends and go to work.

I live in an area without a lot of trains so for example I have to take a 60 min bus ride to get to somwhere where I could've just biked to in 10 mins

I used to share accounts with a friend who had a SNAP membership on her citibike account but another friend of mine got it perma banned so I'm out of luck

I already know about the credit union method but it requires you to deposit money for a certain amount of time and I'm not staying in New York long enough. I don't think I qualify for a SNAP benefit card either.

I'm genuinely willing to pay for an account at a reasonable price or if you know a method please let me know, but I doubt there's any other methods

I'm back riding Citibikes regularly again after a few years off. I swear the app used to sync to Google Fit and accurately track rides, but now it just draws a straight line from pickup to drop-off? Am I missing something? I liked that data collecting automatically.

Edit: Searching old reddit threads, it looks like this function started to get phased out in 2019. Rats.