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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.
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.
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/
Really depends on what aspects of the bike he's working on.
The article mentions rider comfort. Granted, racers expect discomfort in their racing, but the bicycle designer still should make an effort to take what was excruciating and make it merely agonizing if possible. If the bicycle designer has worked out better ergonomics for the angles between the seat, pedals, and handlebars, and worked out how to make them more adjustable by the layperson to make the bike fit any given rider fairly well then it would make sense. If the race bike designer's name is being applied to give it some street cred, thats another matter.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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!
Frame geometry is a well explored and long-term empirically proven science. This is ridiculous and pointless branding.
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
It is essentially the same system, created in Montreal, Canada. The original company running the show went bankrupt from what would appear to be mismanagement (see here). The new technology owner can be found here: http://www.publicbikesystem.co...
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
/. Got confused by the HTML, the article covering the bankruptcy of the original entity: http://www.richter.ca/en/news-...
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
So why don't you go ride a bike designed by some generic computer then?
Saying it's a well explored proven science is an utter load of garbage. Each bike offers different comfort levels, different performance characteristics and benefits in different scenarios. At some point you need a human involved in bike design, preferably someone who's done it before to actually sense check the resulting frame that your magical algorithm has spit out. One size does not fit all.
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.
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.
But the Citibike is one size fits all.
Exactly the kind of solution that can't be shat out by a computer and is best left to designers of high performance custom frames.
Except that they aren't. From their faq: Citi Bike is funded through private capital, sponsorship agreements, and revenues from users.
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.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
There are very few cities *less* like the US than NYC.
Granted, I'm sure the bikes *will* get trashed and vandalized, it is after all NYC, but not because people like cars and hate bikes. You have to be *mad* to drive a car in NYC (well, Manhattan anyway, that mostly where I've been in NYC), and even madder to drive a large one, unless by large you mean basically a tank, which would be pretty much the only way to get pedestrians not to walk right in front of you whenever they want.
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.
This is not a high performance custom frame. It is a steel tubed tank in the shape of a chair that has little in common with any famously designed road bike. There is no design expertise that will allow a single seat post adjustment to accommodate widely varying human anatomies. There is however probably a rigorously developed computer algorithm that can churn out a design that is nominally acceptable for a large range of body types. Furthermore, the new citibike looks to have an identical frame as the previous bikes, probably because its still the same bike, produced by the same company. Serotta added a hole in the seat, new gears, and a EU kickstand...
No but funny enough aerodynamics and weight are the computer solvable problems, while every other component such as ride comfort accommodating a variety of different body types is precisely the job which should be left to someone who ... has designed bikes for a variety of different body types.
Though I did actually have a similar though to you. I can't see what's revolutionary about this. It looks like minor tweaks at best, but not having ridden one I can't really comment. They look different from the equivalent bicycles in my city.... which can only be a good thing given that riding ours can only be compared to some form of medieval torture.
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).