What we were told about the installation of CitiBike in our community by NYCDOT: The program needed some time to catch on, but once it did, we would never want to get rid of it. It was first installed in January 2023. We now have more than a year’s worth of data to analyze, and a new online tool called citibikedata.nyc uses a database of individual dockings and undockings for every station in the city to calculate average usage per station. So, we used it to do a breakdown for Maspeth, Middle Village, Glendale, Ridgewood, and Woodside/Elmhurst south of Queens Blvd for a year’s worth of time ending in June 2024. And what did we find? Really paltry numbers that don’t justify the ridiculous number of stations and docks that have been placed here. Let’s look at some examples:

The three stations with the lowest ridership are all in Maspeth. With only 3 total dockings/undockings per day, the stations at 59 St and 59 Rd, 57 Rd and 58 St, and Grand and 58 Aves came in at the bottom of the list. They have 19-21 docks per station, making these a complete waste of space. It basically means you have one person making a round trip to/from these locations per day and one other person either coming or going.
Let’s hop on over to Metropolitan Avenue. Surely the bike station closest to the M train terminal will be booming with rides, right? Nope. The station at Rentar Plaza has 22 docks with just 7 round trips made to/from it per day. So much for providing “last mile” transportation to transit deserts.

Maybe that was an anomaly. Let’s take a gander at the numbers for Hoffman Drive and Woodhaven Blvd, near e M/R train. There are 24 docks there and 27 rides starting/ending there, which means 13 round trips per day. Oh well.

The station with the most rides – 42 – is in Ridgewood at Catalpa and Woodward Aves. Oddly, it only has 13 docks. But even that is only 21 round trips per day. It’s more than the number of docks, but we were assured there would be such robust ridership that it would be universally embraced and wildly popular. Not really the case here, and this in the most populated area of the district.

If you add up all the docks throughout our community, there are more than 1200 of them. Meanwhile, round trips total about 425 per day. That’s a whole lot of docks sitting empty, a whole lot of space ceded to bike stations, and dozens of parking spaces lost unnecessarily.

We told DOT honchos that most of the people who bike here own their rides and store them on their property. They didn’t listen. We also pointed out that encouraging bike usage means that bus upgrades get pushed to the back burner. They claimed it wasn’t true.

We told them that most people who live here would never dream of paying a fee to a car service in order to ride a bike. They didn’t care.

But CitiBike’s own numbers don’t lie.