Citibike, thoughts for the day

Posted on June 5, 2013

A couple more things I want to mention before I’m done talking about Citibike for now. One is that if you want to check how long your trips are, at least how long they are billed for, you can go to the web page, not the phone app, and log into your accounts and see that info under the trips window. A couple of these with zeros in front lead me to imagine it’s when I couldn’t get a bike. They clearly haven’t worked on the milage aspect of it yet, because it’s all zeros. Anyway it’s a good way to confirm you haven’t gone over time or find out when you have. I’ve noticed quite a few of my trips take just a hair over 30 minutes. I am not being careful or anything, but I think this is interesting, possibly pushing people toward memberships.
image by Amber Sexton

Another thing is that they really have not responded to customer service issues very well via twitter. The website and twitter feed is very sunny without any helpful information, but I glean from the very few responses on twitter that phone calls are what they had been prepared to deal with, until their phones went down. The blog has stats for usage, without any info on outages, problem stations, things that the MTA might have for subway outages. All my tweets reporting station problems have never received a single “we’re working on it” type auto response tweet.

I’ve sent numerous tweets now about the station at 51st street and 6th ave, having problems I’ve not seen at the handful of other stations I’ve been at. Times of the day it just goes down, no one can get a bike out, the docks fill up and you can’t leave a bike. Even when it’s working it takes 30 seconds for the green light to come on so you can get the bike out. Yesterday in a new twist bikes were sitting there with green lights on but locked and couldn’t be removed. Then I finally sent an email, I received no response but tonight was the first night that I left work to do an errand at 6pm, and nearly all the bikes were gone. It was actually a great sight to see. Also the bike I chose released fairly quickly, so I hope even though they never said a thing the station is fixed, at least for now. Really that’s not such a long wait. We are just over a week into the program.

I do love it, I can’t wait for it to expand in Brooklyn. One thing which is interesting is people are still asking me a lot of questions about it, not just in the station. Other users when you run into them, you might to talk to each other. It’s like when something bizarre happens on the subway, everyone all of a sudden has permission to speak to one another. I know this will go away, but it’s fun for now.

It was more interesting in the first couple days though, now mostly it’s the same questions, and they often are asked right after I’ve taken the bike out and am on the clock. Its really interesting how many tourists and casual users cannot get the idea that the rides are timed. That it’s 30 minutes at a time for a daily price of $10, a weekly price of $25, annual price of $95 (plus tax) and that membership gives you 45 minutes each ride plus the convenient key. Every casual street questioner thinks you get the bike all day. The reason the system works is because it’s timed, if they gave them to you all day, you would need a lock, and the bikes would be stolen. I can’t even believe they have kickstands. The whole purpose of all the stations is to take a bike and leave a bike on every leg of whatever trip or errand you are doing etc. The ubiquity of the docks allows for that in Manhattan at least. It’s very hard to give people a satisfying short answer to explain this, yet I do want to be a cheerful ambassador.

Someone who talked to me for a while from the seat of his own bike asked me more knowledgable questions but also was possibly chatting me up I’m not sure. He did say the bike stores are worried. I hope this ends up being good for them and not bad. At any rate I used my coupon and bought a new helmet at a Manhattan shop, which is actually going to be my helmet to keep home and use with my own bike mostly and I’m wearing it in this pic. And I used the spare pads to rehab the old one a bit to leave at work mostly. I brought my own bike into my local shop for a new rack this week. I hope the program creates more riders who wish to own their own bikes, but it’s probably more likely to enfranchise riders who don’t want to, or really can’t own bikes. Tight apartments preventing one from keeping a bike inside, justified fear of leaving one outside, and four floor walkups are all real barriers to owning a bike. I fully hope that a greater fleet of bikes on the street will cause more people to look out for us, that’s the theory anyway. But it is New York.