Citi Bike Will Expand Uptown With Its Too-Sparse Station Network

The good news: Citi Bike is expanding up to 130th Street later this year.

The bad news: Stations in Morningside, Harlem, and East Harlem are going to be more spread out than the bike-share network below 59th Street. As with last year’s additions to the bike-share network, the longer walking distances between stations will make these expansions less convenient for Citi Bike users and sap the overall effectiveness of the system.

DOT and Motivate, the company that runs Citi Bike, have been holding workshops and getting feedback online about where to site stations. Maps for three community board districts have now been released, and the station densities fall short of the 28 stations per square mile recommended by the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

All together, the bike-share maps for Community Board 11 in East Harlem [PDF], Community Board 9 on the West Side [PDF], and Community Board 10 in central Harlem [PDF] equate to a density of a little below 23 stations per square mile. If you look at CB 9 and CB 11 separately, however, the stations are more sparse, in the range of 20-21 stations per square mile.

This is the second year of a three-year expansion phase that will eventually bring Citi Bike to more of Queens and Brooklyn as well. The agreement between DOT and Motivate didn’t require more than 378 new stations to serve the expansion zones, which works out to a lower station density than the original Citi Bike service area. Rumors have swirled that the two parties are close to amending the expansion process so stations are spaced together more tightly, but so far that doesn’t seem to be happening.