It’s time to open bike share to other companies. CitiBike/Lyft does not deserve to keep this monopoly. CitiBike is supposed to both augment and sometimes replace certain modes of transportation, rather than have their specialized bikes be used as recreational bikes that compete with bike rental companies. While it’s great when it works, it fails miserably at this far more often than it succeeds. Let’s compare it to taking a bus, which is probably the closest comparison.
Imagine if you took on buses for transportation, but you could never rely on them for these reasons:
- The buses are all broken down in your neighborhood, so you have to find another means of transportation.
- The buses show up, but the OMNY and other means of paying for your fare are out, so you can’t take the bus.
- The bus shows up at your stop, won’t open its doors, and pulls away.
- They constantly run out of buses during scheduled hours and you have to walk too far to a stop that has them, and then you have some of the other problems.
- You get off the bus properly, but you keep getting charged for the ride and have to call to get this fixed.
- One out of three buses has a mechanical issue, and sometimes you have to get off and change buses. One of those three times you can’t get another bus and have to walk to another stop five blocks away.
- Some neighborhoods get well taken care of by volunteers replacing the buses, while others have to wait until the next day.
- Your daily stop is moved without warning, and you have to figure out where it went.
Bottom line: CitiBike works like the bus system I described above. CitiBike is broken. They keep expanding, but do not have the means, the wherewithal or otherwise take responsibility for keeping the bikes balanced and maintained. The stations take up valuable real estate, which is fine if this worked, but, as Rosanne Rosannadanna used to say, it’s always something. In this past week alone:
- Every single afternoon, the station opposite my building goes devoid of all bikes by 5 pm, for several hours.
- In one ride alone, I switched bikes three times due to faulty pedals, bad brakes, bad pedals, and a wobbly front fork that made me feel unsafe. The QR code was missing from one of them. Two of the three times, I had to try multiple empty docks until I found one that wasn’t completely dead.
- Today, I found the only bike at my station. I rode up the .6 miles to my destination and properly docked my bike. When I returned for another bike, I discovered my ride was still continuing. I had to call customer support to have them manually end the ride. Then I discovered that the entire station was broken, and not a single bike could be undocked. There was no bike available within half a mile, so I walked home with a package in high heat.
Enough! For $179 a year ($15 a month), I expect more. I expect a working system that works most of the time, if not all. I expect that the same consideration is given to my neighborhood as to some in midtown that get concierge service and a constant replenishment of bikes. There’s only one reason this really is happening, and that’s that CitiBike/Lyft is a monopoly in New York. There is no or little competition. It is a closed system, not open to other companies that might be better funded or better organized. No competition disincentivizes companies like this from improving their service.