Although not every request for a bike-share station could be accommodated, those potential riders in Manhattan and in Brooklyn neighborhoods closest to the island will have plenty of Citi Bike stations to choose from. Following Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement of the bank-funded program on Monday, the city has released an interactive draft of the map, which does not yet include potential stations in Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, or the Upper West and East Sides. Most of Queens is just out of luck, while Staten Island and the Bronx look to be getting ignored completely.
There’s also a fair amount of hand-wringing still happening about the pricing structure, in which long rides become very expensive quite quickly. The city’s reasoning, as explained by Transportation Nation: “this is transportation, not recreation.”
According to transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, “The system is the first unsubsidized bike share system and it is designed to incentivize people to return bikes promptly so there will always a be a bike available for any user who wants one. There is no other system of this size and structure that compares, and instead of costing tens of millions of dollars to implement as budgets are being cut, the system will actually provide a new transportation option and revenue for the city.”
