What if a 45-minute electric Citi Bike ride were capped at $3?
A new campaign from Transportation Alternatives is calling for just that: capping the price for Citi Bike members at $3, which is the cost of a subway or bus ride.
Currently, for a member, it’s $12.15 — and more for non-members.
“My daughter, who recently moved to the city in her early 20s, really wants to use these for transportation,” Citi Bike rider Sarah Max said. “And we were actually just chatting about it the other day, that it’s almost as much as a taxi.”
In 2021, about a year after Lyft took over Citi Bike, its yearly earnings were about $88 million. By 2025, that rose to $229 million — and the price for Citi Bike has gone up each year as well.
“When I first started riding, the e-bikes were a lot cheaper, and all of the Citi Bikes were a lot cheaper,” rider Kai Osorio said. “Then I think when Lyft took over, the price got shot up a lot.”
“In D.C. and in Chicago, it was a lot cheaper to get around,” Osorio added.
Brooklyn City Council Member Lincoln Restler said New York’s bike-share program is the most expensive of any major city.
He introduced a bill to lower the price, but it has yet to move.
“We are the only major city with a large bike-share program that doesn’t offer public subsidy for bike-share,” Restler said. “And it’s time that we revisit that.”
“We subsidize every other form of transit, from our ferries, to our express buses, to the subways,” he added. “We should be doing the same for Citi Bike.”
Currently, the city has a revenue-sharing agreement with Lyft. Mayor Zohran Mamdani in the past has shown support for lowering the price, but has offered no plan.