Citibikelash bash

 

 Queens Chronicle

A few weeks after an 18-slot Citi Bike station was installed at the corner of 97th Street and 23rd Avenue, some residents of East Elmhurst ended the summer with a rally to call for its removal.

Holding signs that read “Ban Citi Bike,” the East Elmhurst Corona Alliance along with community residents banded together last month to protest against the bike share company’s placement of docking stations in roadbeds on residential streets.

The group also started a Change.org petition, which was sent to David Risher, CEO of Lyft — which owns the service. The petition had garnered 323 signatures at the time of publication.

Frank Taylor, an East Elmhurst resident, community activist and chairman of Community Board 3, argues that the bike racks should be placed in commercial areas as opposed to residential, and that parking spaces are being taken away from residents.

“You can put them where people are actually going to use them, such as outside schools, shelters, hotels, parks — even over by Citi Field, where there’s a lack of bikes — but not outside of people’s property,” Taylor said. “Parking spots are valuable, especially in the East Elmhurst community, because we have a lot of seniors here who are not riding bikes.”

He also said the placement of the docking stations was in poor taste, due to their proximity to the East Elmhurst homes of late civil rights leader Malcolm X and the late former Queens Borough President Helen Marshall.

Giovanna Reid, district manager of CB 3, said that the Department of Transportation approached the board for feedback on the placement of the docking stations in East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and North Corona, but did not adhere to its recommendation to avoid installing them on residential blocks.

“Your average biker is not going to come to these locations. They are strictly residential, and there’s no real bike path to these homes,” Reid said. “I think they could have better planned for this. They should revisit their placement of these bicycles.”

The DOT says it has received minimal negative feedback during the outreach and installation process of Citi Bikes. The agency recognizes that station siting does impact parking but said it uses sidewalks and street spaces left open at corners for “daylighting” — improving drivers’ line of sight — where feasible.

The agency strives to maintain a network density of 28 bike stations per square mile, to ensure that riders do not have to walk more than a few minutes to get to the closest station.

Mona Bruno, a spokesperson for the DOT, added that Citi Bike has become a wildly popular transportation option in New York City in recent years, and that ridership has soared since the pandemic.

“We’re excited to continue expanding service in Queens to help offer residents a sustainable and efficient way to get around — and we always try to best balance the various uses and needs of our streets and sidewalks,” Bruno said.

Jon Orcutt, advocacy director at Bike New York, a nonprofit that promotes and encourages bicycling and bicycle safety, said that Citi Bike is one of the best-used bike-share systems in the world, but that it could be improved in certain ways to make sustainable transportation easier for New Yorkers in transit deserts.

“I think the city could better link small mobility elements, like bikes, to the transit system. For example, if you don’t live right on Roosevelt Avenue, the 7 train might be a long walk, but it might only be a 10 minute bike ride or less,” Orcutt said. “There’s a lot of strategies you can put together to make it easy for people to get around without cars in a city like New York. While we are the transit capital of the United States, we don’t do some basic things that other places with really good, sustainable transportation systems do, and one of them is linking bikes and transit very explicitly.”