Citi Bike is expanding in the Bronx to include Community District 6 and parts of Community District 8, and the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) is collecting feedback for where the bike docks should be located.
The bike share company, which is owned by rideshare company Lyft allows riders to rent bicycles off of docks that are either installed on the street or sidewalk. Users can ride outside the Citi Bike service area, but the bikes need to be returned to a designated dock.
Citi Bike has been growing in popularity in the Bronx, as ridership is two times higher year to date than it was during the same period last year, a spokesperson for Lyft told the Bronx Times.
Rides in the Bronx average more than 21 minutes, nearly 60% longer than the citywide average of about 13 minutes, the spokesperson said. And the Grand Concourse neighborhood is the busiest section of the borough for the program.
While Citi Bike offers regular and electric bikes, about 80% of rides over the past year in the Bronx were on e-bikes, compared to 40% citywide, according to the spokesperson.
The expanded areas build off of the existing Citi Bike footprint in the borough, which includes most of the southwest portions of the Bronx, up to the eastern side of the Jerome Park Reservoir.
To the west of the reservoir, the Citi Bike zone will branch into Kingsbridge Heights, Kingsbridge, Van Cortlandt Village and Marble Hill in Community District 8, but the program will not extend to other parts of the district, like Spuyten Deyvil, Fieldston, Riverdale or North Riverdale.
Meanwhile, on the eastern side of the existing bike share area, the expanded zone largely mimics Community District 6’s boundaries, including Belmont, Bathgate, East Tremont and West Farms.
Installation is anticipated to take place in the fall, a DOT spokesperson told the Bronx Times.
The new Citi Bike areas will fill out the Bronx portion of Citi Bike’s Phase 3 plan, which was announced in 2019 by former Mayor Bill de Blasio with a completion goal for this year’s end. While the public-private partnership launched in Manhattan and Brooklyn in 2013, and reached Queens in a 2015-2017 expansion, the program didn’t touch the Bronx until the third phase’s 2019 launch.
There are currently no plans to expand Citi Bike further once Phase 3 — which was funded by $100 million from Lyft — is complete, the DOT spokesperson told the Bronx Times.
While Citi Bike is nonexistent in the eastern parts of the borough, East Bronxites can rent electronic scooters as part of the Bronx e-scooter pilot, which DOT wants to make permanent. But while the East Bronx e-scooter area makes up for large swaths of the borough excluded from the Citi Bike map, some neighborhoods don’t have access to either micro-mobility option, including Norwood, City Island, much of Hunts Point, and Riverdale and its surrounding northwest Bronx areas.
For those with thoughts about where exactly the new Citi Bikes should go, an interactive map through DOT allows people to add markers where they would like to see the stations. The map is available at nycdotprojects.info/2023Bronx.
Lisa Morasco, a senior planner with NYC DOT, told Community Board 8 at a March 16 Traffic and Transportation Committee meeting that the average station size in the community district will hold about 22 bikes, with larger stations near transit hubs holding 30-40 bikes. She said the agency doesn’t yet know how many stations will go in the district.
CB8 anticipates that DOT will present the agency’s selected locations to the board in May or June, according to CB8 Traffic and Transportation Committee chair Kelli Buford. The deadline for suggestions is March 30, according to the board.
DOT has not yet presented the expansion to CB6.
Citi Bike has about 160,000 annual members, and about 100,000 daily trips citywide in peak riding months, according to DOT’s presentation. Each bike sees about four trips per day, according to the agency.
A single 30-minute Citi Bike ride costs $4.49; a day pass that includes unlimited 30-minute rides within 24 hours costs $19; and an annual membership, which includes unlimited 45-minute rides, costs $205, according to DOT. E-bikes have additional charges, and there are also late fees.
NYCHA residents and SNAP recipients can ride for $5 per month, and more than half of rides over the past year in the borough were taken by bicyclists utilizing this reduced fare program, the Lyft spokesperson said.
Reach Aliya Schneider at aschneider@schnepsmedia.com or (718) 260-4597. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes
