Frugal Traveler Bike Sharing in New York: The Tourist’s Perspective By SETH KUGEL When New York’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, announced plans for the city’s bike-sharing program at a 2011 press conference she called it “a fast, easy, affordable way to get around town.” So now that the program has kicked off with 6,000 cobalt-blue Citi Bikes at 300 locations south of 59th Street in Manhattan, and in parts of Brooklyn, how fast, easy and affordable is it? For the purposes of this column, of course, affordable comes first. For annual members, who pay $95 plus tax ($60 plus tax in some discounted cases) for a year’s worth of unlimited 45-minute rides, it’s a good deal. It also can be fast: with all those stations a ride is often quicker than a subway-and-walk combination. “Easy” might be a stretch, but once local riders get used to the challenges of Manhattan cycling, I’ll grant that to the commissioner as well. But what about for tourists? On Sunday, the first day 24-hour and weekly access passes became available, I planned a day around the city to see if it would be fast, easy and affordable for a traveler new to the city. The answer: not for everyone. To be clear, I’m an unabashed fan of bike sharing and am overjoyed New York finally caught up with many European cities. I also had a great day — pedaling from Midtown to Murray’s Bagels in the Village for breakfast, then down to the Staten Island Ferry terminal, up to Chinatown for lunch, over to the High Line for a stroll and then back to Midtown for some late-afternoon culture at MoMA. Fast? Yes. But it wasn’t so easy, and it definitely was not cheap. If you don’t know how bike sharing works, it’s pretty much the same around the world: Users pick up bikes at any station and can return it to any other within a specified time frame, often 30 minutes. (There’s almost always a mapping app to find the nearest station.) They can do that as many times as they like, without additional charge, for the rest of the day or week or year. They can also keep the bike longer, but will be charged a bit more; the idea is to use the bikes as transportation, not sheer recreation. But in New York, short-term users pay more — both overall and when compared with annual members — than in comparable cities elsewhere. In London, the daily pass is £2 ($3), about 2 percent the cost of an annual pass. In Paris, it’s 1.70 euros ($2.15), 6 percent of an annual pass. In New York, it’s $10.83, tax included, more than 10 percent the cost of a yearly membership. Put another way, the cost of a day’s biking in London or Paris is almost precisely the cost of a single subway trip; in New York it’s about four times that amount. (The weekly pass is $25 plus tax, compared with £10 in London and 8 euros in Paris.) Of course, the bikes aren’t meant to be a replacement for the subway system, exactly: they’re meant to supplement public transportation and to be enjoyable. But in London and Paris (and Brussels and Berlin and Toulouse, three other cities I’ve been to recently) they clearly save you money as well. That is not the case in New York. The weekly pass is a slightly better deal, but it won’t replace a $30 weekly MetroCard: there are too many trips you can’t make in 30 minutes, and the bikes don’t yet extend north of 59th Street (think Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum, Harlem). Yearly members can take the bikes out for 45 minutes at a time; for daily or weekly members, it’s 30 minutes. And the penalties for going beyond those time frames are steeper for nonsubscribers: $4 for an extra 30 minutes, instead of $2.50. For those considering how this compares with renting a bike from a shop: An all-day rental, including helmet and lock, from Bike Rental NYC in Midtown is $32 with a reservation, $39 without — but of course that allows you to travel without time limits or geographical restrictions. All that said, if you love biking, or if you will use the bikes to substitute for taxis rather than subways, then the deal doesn’t sound quite as bad. So let’s move on. What about fast? I’d say yes. They are fast. Not literally: the bikes are heavy, so you won’t see program users careening down Broadway like crazed bike messengers. But assuming you’ve mapped out directions in advance, for just about any trip in a 20- to 25-block range, they beat the subway or bus. On all five routes I took, even when I got lost and took roundabout routes to use bike lanes, I never came close to the 30-minute limit, and always ended up within a two-minute walk of my destination — and sometimes right next to it, like at the High Line. The 15 or 20 minutes each trip took was almost certainly quicker than walk-subway-walk. Finally, was it easy? Hey, this is New York: nothing is easy. And there are two learning curves for short-term users. First, the details of the system itself: how to pay, how to remove the bikes, how to plan within those 30-minute limits. But the real shock comes from simply biking on city streets. Despite great improvements in signage and bike lanes, New York is no Copenhagen or Berlin when it comes to biking. You’ll need to get the hang of planning your routes to avoid potential pitfalls like the narrow streets of Chinatown, the jarring cobblestones of SoHo and the nightmarish avenues without bike lanes but with plenty of daredevil cabdrivers. I made all those mistakes. For my first trip, from Fifth Avenue and 49th Street to Avenue of the Americas and 13th Street, I didn’t plan my route beyond scouting out the nearby bike lanes on the neighborhood map posted at every Citi Bike station. Big mistake. I was befuddled almost immediately by a construction site near Times Square, and ended up biking down Seventh Avenue, perhaps the worst biking route in the city short of jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Taxis swerving to catch fares, trucks rumbling unpredictably, no bike signs at all — I felt a like a puffy dandelion seed head floating through a spray of machine gun fire. From then on, I started using the city’s bike map, which I had downloaded onto my smartphone. That was a slight improvement, though its PDF format is not mobile-friendly. The answer here is to use the HopStop app, which gives great biking directions. (Google Maps also offers bike directions, but not on its iPhone app.) I will say that when I was in bike lanes — especially the bike corridors that are almost completely shielded from traffic — riding was, if not a joy, then as close an approximation to joy as you can have when a taxi could still illegally lurch in front of you at any moment. So, should you use Citi Bikes on your trip to New York? Not if you’re just trying to save money. And not if you don’t want to pack a helmet: though I’ve used bike share programs without helmets in other cities — ones with far fewer taxis and far more dedicated bike lanes — I wouldn’t do it in New York. But for those planning longer stays, who are just a bit intrepid and for whom $27.19 isn’t a burden, go for it. After a day or two, you’ll find biking a useful and (mostly) pleasant way to get around the city, and seriously, those stations are everywhere. It’s also great exercise in a city that can easily be fattening; I more than made up for the massive pumpernickel bagel with cream cheese, tomato and onion from Murray’s and the street food I bought at a Chinatown festival. Finally, it could easily save you money on night life — by the time I was done with my five-leg trip, I was completely exhausted.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 03:17:13 +0000
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