By now, everyone has heard, or read, one or more anecdotal reviews about Citi Bike. It rides too slow; it rides fast enough. It’s impossible to dock; it docks just fine. Who to believe? What is the Truth? There was only one way to find out: send our interns out to various Citi Bike stations around the city to survey 100 people who have actually taken a spin on the things. And that’s what we did. Here are the results.
For our first question, we simply wanted to know what our Citi Bikers thought of the overall experience. Nobody hated it!
Fine, Citi Bike is good-to-great, but is it worth the money? The Powers That Be have determined the privilege of using Citi Bike is worth $95 a year. (You can also buy monthly or daily passes, but $95 is by far the best bang for your buck.)
The New York Post has been a nonstop source of complaints from people who have had difficulties renting or returning their Citi Bikes. And, indeed, it does appear that there’s some room for improvement in there.
By design, the Citi Bike is not among the world’s most agile bicycles. It’s a utilitarian piece of equipment meant to get you from point A to point B. A majority of Citi Bikers don’t seem to mind.*
We were curious to see how the rest of the city has been responding to this novel contraption in their streets. People are being less dickish than we would have expected.
Finally, we wanted to know if people minded that they were basically paying for the opportunity to pedal an advertisement for Citibank around the city. Not enough to stop doing it, apparently.
Ashley Collman, Bridget Read, Neha Sharma, Sam Sontag, Lauren Duca, and Katie Zavadski contributed to this piece.
*The pie chart in question four originally mismatched responses to their values. It has been fixed.
