4. Citi Bike
That leads us to Citi Bike, which launched in May 2013 as a public-private partnership operated by what is now called Motivate, originally a subsidiary of bike-share company Alta. Additional funding came from Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group, and of course from the title sponsor, Citibank. From an initial 332 stations and 6,000 bikes, the system now has 750+ stations and 12,000 bikes across 65 neighborhoods. Modeled on successful bike share systems in Paris and other cities, Citi Bike is the largest bike share system in the United States (as of 2017 in terms of number of stations) and in the top 10 in the world currently in terms of number of bikes. Cities like Hangzhou and Taiyuan in China and Paris far surpass it in number of bikes, but the Citi Bike system is becoming comparable to London.
Citi Bike launched 200 e-bikes at the end of August, and will release up to 1000 bikes during the L-train subway shutdown. In July of this year, it was announced that ride sharing company Lyft had purchased Motivate, which is currently facing a lower than usual number of bikes in service due to maintenance. Streetsblog reported that only 59% of the available bikes were in service.
