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New Redesigned Citi Bikes To Hit NYC Streets This Year
New submitter Robertoswins writes: 1,000 new redesigned Citi Bikes will be hitting the streets of New York City this summer with a slimmer redesign. Designed by Olympic racing bike designer Ben Serrota, the new bikes will start rolling out in a week. Another 1,400 units of the new bikes will be added during the company's expansion into Brooklyn and Queens later this year.
I just awakened from a coma and it's the fourth month's fool?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
wtf?
The real problem with the bikes in New York and anywhere else that far North is that for 4 - 6 months out of the year it is simply too cold or too wet for anyone but insane bike messengers to ride around. All the money and effort that has gone into redesigning the traffic system for this seasonal commuting option is simply insane. The program would make much more sense in cities with milder weather.
Ben Serotta is the spelling, for what it's worth.
He built great frames, and a lot of people were sorry to see the company vanish after a merger. I'm glad he's found a new gig in the bike world, coz he's a nice guy.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
They're bicycles lent out by the city. I would have been nice to include that little fact in TFA or the summary.
Montreal has had this for a few years (BIXI), hasn't been profitable yet but many people use it and enjoy it for the couple of months when it's available (usually early May to November if I remember correctly). https://montreal.bixi.com/
This is like calling a jeweler to design your tank.
I'm all for public transport bikes, but realistically not much is newsworthy here. Yes the bikes have been updated but the changes are underwhelming. And seriously, the biggest change is "a hole in the middle to stop the saddles from getting soaked with rain"? That's not an uncommon seat style since it prevents bike-related erectile dysfunction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/health/nutrition/serious-riders-your-bicycle-seat-may-affect-your-love-life.html
Maybe you should get started on reading all the relevant sections of NYC Vehicles and Traffic which explains how turning vehicles are supposed to use turning lanes. This includes non powered an animal powered vehicles like the donkey cart you infest.
If men in tight pants make you feel funny in the swimsuit area, you should learn to enjoy it because it's perfectly natural for many people.
Why not? The roads were built for them, not cars.
I realize you are trolling, but for those unaware: bicycles are vehicles and have the rights and responsibilities thereof. It is proper to make a left turn from the left turn lane by placing your bicycle in the middle of the turn lane, riding with the traffic until the turn is completed, and then joining the margin or bicycle lane thereafter. Alternately, you can dismount and cross on the crosswalk as a pedestrian.
Kind of like the BIXI we have up here.
There are some really cool areas to bike in NYC, but they are not well interconnected. The High Line is beautiful, but is only 1.5 miles long. A nice walk, but not really worth breaking out a bike. Brooklyn Bridge, same deal. Central Park is bike-able, mostly, as is a lot of the shore front, but it is all scattered in short stretches which are more suited to walking. If you have the courage to mix it up on street level, rock on, there are a lot of painted bike lanes, but you run a heavy risk of sudden crushing death by a taxi helmed by someone from Durka-durkastan. At best, you're going to be weaving in and out of stopped cars for miles and miles, breathing the heady fumes of stopped taxies and buses.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Citi Bike in New York, Divvy in Chicago, Bixi in Montreal, etc...
Civic bike share systems are becoming a big deal in a lot of cities these days, and it would really be helpful if Google Maps, Apple Maps, MS/Bing Maps, Nokia Maps, etc... would start integrating with them as a first class utility like other public transit options (available in all apps, considered in routing, etc...) rather than relegating each city's system to it's own app.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Why are battery assisted bikes so expensive? I looked at one for 2000$. Even the conversion kits are 300$ without the battery. Why?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The guy on the picture in the linked article couldn't look more tense, like it's his first time on a bicycle without training wheels, but according to the caption it's Jay Walder, CEO of Citi Bike. What's up with that?
Regarding the new design: Why didn't they completely enclose the chain? The bikes have internal gear hubs, no derailleurs, so they could've prevented oil stains on the pants and dirt on the chain with one simple modification.
Check out Transit app (http://transitapp.com), which does do this. - I am not affiliated in an way.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Lots of apps do it, that's not what I'm asking for. I want it integrated so that it's just automatically there in every app that uses a map. So, for instance, I can look up a restaurant in Yelp, and see where I should drop off a bike nearby without switching apps and finding the place again.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Most Citi bikes go ununsed as far as I can tell.
You tell wrong. There are 6,000 bikes in the system and there's roughly 35,000 daily users.
I personally would've rather seen cleaner, faster, quieter and more reliable subways than more advert-bikes. But it's not so sexy for citibank to donate a tiny fraction of the MTA's budget for some billboards/posters.
Thank goodness we have urban transit planners, people with degrees in this stuff. They are heavily, heavily pushing bicycle transit and bike shares. Not because it's 'sexy', but because it works.
You can plop down a bike share station in a matter of days or weeks (the biggest hassle are the community meetings) which affords enormous flexibility; it takes months to redo a bus route, and decades to plan a subway line. Bike share bikes convert a fair number of people over to bike ownership, too - and the presence or more bike riders on the city's streets makes the streets safer for everyone.
Please help metamoderate.
We have what I'm assuming is the original design (in Minneapolis). The chains are enclosed enough that you'd have to be be pretty klutzy to get your pants greasy. i'm guessing the reason they aren't fully enclosed is just for easy of maintenance. They use chain tensioners which means you'd need a fairly large chain case to enclose the chain along the whole path.
Bikes do not have the responsibilities of any other vehicle.
Talk to me when they're registered and they obey stop signs and red lights.
Talk to me when they're registered and they obey stop signs and red lights.
The last three US cities I lived in required registration of bikes, varying from $10 per year to $10 per 4 year period. They all required bicycles to stop at stop signs and red lights... which is probably why they put stops signs on bike paths and some traffic signals had bike specific lights. I've seen all of these laws enforced. If they don't enforce them where you live, you should complain about having crappy police officers instead of creating some legal strawman to make you feel better about hating on some group.
I recently read that of all pedestrians injured in London from vehicles skipping red lights, 95% were the result of motor vehicles.
You are correct that bikes do not have the responsibilities of motor vehicles. They also do not have the mass nor speed of any other vehicle.
There is no other country that has a greater hate and despise of cyclists than the U.S, and where drivers think they own the road, and that roads are for cars and not traffic in general. To the Americans it's also a merit to drive a big car and burn gas and blow fumes, so how will this ever succeed? These bicycles will get trashed and vandalized, stand unused at best.
What's up with that?
How do you know that's not his happy bike-riding face?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
A few years ago a tea party politician in Colorado opined that bike sharing programs were part of a liberal U.N. conspiracy. Like a real conspiracy orchaistrated by some shadowy cabal.
What? Have you ever even been to New York?
The High Line isn't for biking. The bike paths are open and don't get caught in traffic even during heavy commute times. The shore paths are mostly complete, and on the west side it goes from top to bottom with fully bike-friendly wide paved paths.
There are massive bike path networks along the parkways in the Bronx. There are long divided bike paths going as far out as the Rockaways and Flushing.
I bike from Queens to downtown Manhattan every day for my commute. It's about 7.5 miles, and I have easily five different ways that consist almost entirely of safe, clear bike paths.
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Are they self-driving?
Yup, that would be cool. They really need a plugin architecture, similar to the custom keyboards or maybe even an ability to specify layers via a URL, similar to calendars?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
How are bicycles going to be registered? If it's going to be a placard on the frame, what if I switch all the parts to a new frame? Some people do this all the time. Maybe after TPP is law, and people aren't allowed to work on their bikes any more, we can ban all of the cyclists who don't have new bikes that they have to take to the Schwinn Center to change an inner tube. Or maybe we should make every cyclist wear a number on their back, because there's nothing dystopian about that. Frankly riding bikes has made me into much more of a libertarian (but NOT a US Libertarian).