Citi Bike Reviews

by Ssssfffffff

I think this app is an awesome tool for people to commute and get places when the trains/buses/cabs, or walking, aren’t portions. I have my own bike but it’s been getting maintenance, so I decided to try out the this app for the first time. The gear system on these things really isn’t that great, you can pedal very hard but not really cover that much ground like a true bike. Also on my second time ever, the bike would not lock in the station...it was 3 am, and the subways and buses were not operating properly. The man on the phone told me to go to another station where there were 5 docks a few blocks away. I get there and there was only one dock and Again, the bike would not lock! I was starting to get charged overage, so I called again and asked what I could do, and I was told unfortunately I had to go to another station. I said that I was just told to go to THIS station but that the guy was wrong because there was only one dock and that I just wanted to be refunded and if I could just leave the bike but that I couldn’t leave the Bike because I would get charged for damages ....he then hung up on me. I called ONE last time and the lady said that she would send me an email, that, if I DO get charged, the email will basically cover me. I cannot wait to delete CitiBike and my account...just waiting to make sure I don’t get charged some ridiculous fee....never riding this app again.

by Svensie@88

It seems not possible or extremely hard to cancel memberships online. While logged in and going to Help-cancel membership, they tell you to log in and follow the link to - manage auto renew -, you go to that link and it tells you to log in and follow the link to - manage auto renew (again I was already logged in on then site). At one point it seemed I accomplished turning off auto renew but then still go auto renewed an month later and the next month............ Finally called after diving into the internet to find their hard to find customer service phone number on a Blog.... and asked to just delete me account. They said they couldn’t do that and had to hold onto my information which I assume also include my credit card they keep charging..... um Why?? I will never this app again in my life long or short. Unnecessary to make this so difficult. U win this one. Seems like it could be a good company as it rent shares bicycles but to go to this length to just cancel my membership speaks volumes of why this app one of the good guys. It’s over this app, just let me go.

by MorpheusJudicator

This sounds great until you try it. Rather than the awesome systems of other cities where you can leave the bike anywhere, here you must travel between docking stations even though the bikes are not electric. What this means practically is there MUST be an open dock or else you are stuck with the bike and paying for it even if you are done riding. If you are not lucky as we were not, every dock in the area was full or filled up just before we arrived. When you finally dock, it may be far out of your way negating the benefit of riding and causing you to miss you extremely expensive or important activity. We also had trips where because of docking issues, we had the bike for SECONDS over 30 minutes (didn’t even hit 31 minutes) and were charged the extra $4. This nickel and diming essentially easily adds up to double or triple the price until we found it would have been faster and cheaper to take an Uber. Suggest to avoid and make them come up with a better business model.

by Trespix

The Citi Bike NYC is diving into a terrible failure to look after your clients. Almost every day, my girlfriend is facing issues when she takes a bike, especially e-bikes. Many times she has taken an e-bike, it shows that the battery is fully charged or partially. When she starts riding it, and AFTER THEY CHARGE HER, the bike just doesn't work anymore, and she has to force her knees to pedal a heavy bike to her work. She often went to another station to change her bike, and when she gets it, i's the same problem. We've sent an email to try getting back the money they have charged from the damaged bikes, but they don't care and don't answer her back. We are stopping using the service and figure out a solution to get our money back.

by Shannon_212

The group share icon/option is suddenly not available!! I have seen several comments on the reviews about this. Went out this weekend and wanted to get 2 bikes but couldn’t. I called customer service while I was out but they could not tell me when it would be available again and could not help me get a 2nd bike. Tried to get a single day pass at the kiosk but if you use your credit card in file you can’t get a 2nd bike! That makes no sense. I can pay for it and was willing to pay $12 for the 2nd bike. Customer service was not helpful. They did refund the $12. f you go the “help” section on CitiBike it shows you how to do the group share still but it’s not an option. I got my membership because I wanted to be able to use it on the weekend with my family once in a while. Please refund me a prorated amount of my membership! I’ll just start using the local bike shops again. Lyft has notoriously bad/subpar software/developers so this is no surprise!

by Neptunite_

I experienced charges to my card for rides I never authorized twice. Customer service overlooked the problem and instead told me that they’d delay fees until I find a bike that I never used. Twice. Received no reply after explaining for a second time. I settled a balance recently using my venmo debit card, only to be hit with another unsettled balance, despite my card having more than enough funds for rides. I re-entered my card info and it said something went wrong. Because of this I am now running late to work. This was the last straw for CitiBike, I’m done with it.

Update:
Can y’all please maintain your ebikes better? I find something wrong with them almost every time I use them. I end up having to return them, and I’m still getting charged. If you’re going to charge me for an incompetent bike at least maintain it better. I’m losing money on transportation that’s slower than the bus! For this I may as well go through traffic on a bus.

by Citifool

This is less a review of an app than of the program in general, so take that as you will. I work in midtown and it’s impossible to dock a bike in the morning and impossible to get a bike for the evening commute home. I find myself wandering from station to station, chasing shadows, hoping the one or two bikes CitiBike tells me are left are still available by the time I get there. It’s yet to happen. I’ve walked two minutes to a station that said it had 8 bikes to find it empty. There’s a “valet station” near my workplace—and this is more a legitimate criticism of CitiBike —and three times now CitiBike told me a valet was available only for me to fine the station as barren and neglected as my heart. I bought an annual pass and feel like a fool. You should try it out before committing. I won’t be using it to commute—only for the odd fun ride, which is probably what it’s best for anyway.

by A. B. B.

I docked my bike at Governor’s Island on Saturday, only realizing I hadn’t done it correctly once the last ferry back to the island had left from Brooklyn. Bridge Park. That Saturday evening Tropical Storm Henri rolled in and made it impossible and completely unsafe to get to the island to redock the bike for the rest of the weekend. I sent countless messages through CitiBike trying to get support for the situation and didn’t receive any answer until Sunday morning. The answer I did receive was a canned response that barely provided any form of solution, instead urging me to go redock the bike on an island during a hurricane. They offered to send an operation team but gave no details on what that meant and never elaborated even though I asked continuously. Their latest email informed me the bike is now considered missing and that I’ll be charged the $1200. this app riders know that these docks are terrible - individual docks tricky to successfully use and oftentimes entire docks out of commission. To have such terrible customer service and such strict policies is ridiculous and to have absolutely no flexibility during a weather emergency is unacceptable.

by EugeneNam56

I used citi bikes for the first time yesterday. I never thought I’d need to use it, but I noticed that there were also electric bikes, and it piqued my interest because I never rode an electric bike before. So I thought, why not? I’ll take a single 30-minute ride for just $3. I ended up having a pretty good time, and I later decided to go for another 30-minute ride.

Never again.

When I checked my ride history, it said in small letters on the bottom: “Electric bike upgrade: $4.50.” Hmm... literally nowhere in CitiBike did it say that the electric bikes would cost extra... but it’s only $1.50 extra since my ride was originally $3, so it’s fine... right? No. I checked my bank balance today, and I got charged $3.27 twice ($3 + tax for both rides), but then I got charged TWO MORE TIMES, once for $4.58 and another for $5.06 the next day. I then realized that they later charge you an EXTRA ~$4 if you pick out an electric bike.

Not only did using an electric bike more than double my bill, I was NEVER TOLD BEFOREHAND that it would do so. I am never using citi bikes again. This is just a heads-up for anyone thinking of using the citi bikes, and especially for anyone considering using one of their electric bikes.

by Concastle

I have been a Citi Bike annual member for over 4 years and it has been a huge benefit. Once Lyft took over things have only gone downhill. Some docks never have regular peddle bikes and the cost of E-bikes is EXORBITANT! Also part of why I ride the bikes is for the EXERCISE and I don’t know want ebikes. There are several versions of the actual bike and all of the good ones are getting phased out. I ride with a lot of friends and the increased cost of a single ride for them is UNNECESSARY! They also removed the ability for me to buy a ride for my friend from my app and they removed the ability to buy one time ride at the station. It shouldn’t cost more than a subway ride. It’s all so stupid. The design of CitiBike is also really bad and it’s not clear enough for docking availability. Someone from this app or Lyft please call me so that we can have a focus group!!! If there was ANY OTHER competition for bike share in NYC I would abandon this app.

by AMR10007

While the scan to unlock a bike is handy, it hasn’t always worked for me, and though they say you can key in the bike number, it isn’t always obvious where the bike number is. Also, you used to be able to see the map on the entire screen, to pick a station with lots of available bikes or docks, but now the scan option takes more than 1/3 of the screen most of the time. The map is also much slower to update as you pan across it. I like to see where I can dock before I take a bike, and doing that is much slower and more painful than it used to be.
Another complaint, is that the plan a ride option is even harder to use than before, which I find amazing since it wasn’t easy to use in the older version.

by Alex2a

They’ve basically replaced the Citi Bike app with Lyft - I imagine the long term plan may be to force everyone to just use the Lyft app.

I used to be an active user of the this app Bike app when it was fully managed by Motivate. This new update to the Lyft branded version feels like a step backwards because it’s basically just the Lyft app with bikes. Sure you can still do the basics, but to me it looks like the focus was fitting bike share into Lyft’s design rather than building a bike share app.

Individual features like group rides are missing. CitiBike only shows bike docks when you zoom in on a specific location, otherwise the map is empty. Ride history doesn’t show Bike Angels points earnings. Seeing empty/full docks at a glance feels less intuitive.

Maybe these features will return in time. But for now, I would much rather be using the Citi Bike app that was built for bike share. I’m happy to use the actual Lyft app if I want to use Lyft features.

I will say the one positive of this version is scan to unlock (but that was already available in the Lyft app).

by Carmz457

I see the comments dating back to November of last year about needing the “plan your route” back on CitiBike . Do you have any updates on when this feature will be back?? It is very much missed.

Also, I’ve noticed that searching for locations has been glitchy. I’ve searched for really well known places (that show up fine in google maps) and get zero results on CitiBike. Not sure what the issue is, but makes it very frustrating since I had to go to Google, get the exact address and then head back to this app app. The locations were: Century 21 Department store (I believe there are 3 in the city), West Elm (again multiple locations in nyc), Silvercup Studios (there are three main locations).

by Ggtgevyggscybjgfed

I upgraded from a version of CitiBike that was a few months old so I don’t know what I missed in between. What I do see, though, is that it takes a very long time to zoom and scroll CitiBike , and when you’re out there trying to get somewhere quickly and want to find a bike or dock and get going, this is very frustrating. It also seems that the Angels point designations on the map are sometimes way behind (it appears that I am often seeing the points from the last time I used CitiBike , even if that was hours ago). This also makes it difficult to use.

Given that this is an app supporting a transit system, speed really should be a key priority.

by Krash81

CitiBike makes it very easy to check out a bike and ride. I love being able to turn bikes in at different locations. Makes getting around in the city so easy and convenient. I wish CitiBike would send an alarm/notification when time is almost up...or give directions to a nearby docking station with open spots. Also, many stations are either always full or always empty.

by Oiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Would be better if it had an option to select multiple routes like google maps might (going alone riverside park which feels safer than the street). Just to better estimate time of travel and maybe address level of safety as some areas are much safer than others due to where the bike lane is located in relation to cars. Also maybe adding a level of elevation feature/graph like google ? I could just pull google up but it makes more sense to keep it all in one app. Overall satisfied with the main features and functions of CitiBike

by EliHG15

I have been an avid Citi Bike member for nearly two years and love how easy it has made traveling through the city! That said, the new app has proved more difficult for me. Stations listed as open on CitiBike are then closed when I attempt to unlock a bike; some bikes without QR codes or legible serial numbers; e-bikes listed as unavailable for rides despite showing up as fully charged; difficulty logging into the new app for the first time.

I recognize there are small issues when making transitions like this, but hopefully things will get worked out soon because the best part of Citi Bike is the convenience.

by Gilbert Eats 2 Much

For years I’ve debated purchasing a bike. Not just to get around the city with ease, or to forego the hustle ‘n bustle of the MTA & cabs, but to explore areas of the city that I had not explored in the decade-plus that I’ve lived in Manhattan. With this app, I can enjoy the best of the city.

Now that it’s getting warmer, I take a ride from the gym to the river every morning. It’s therapeutic, gets my blood flowing AND it’s convenient. There are docking stations everywhere I turn. The ease of using CitiBike makes for an added bonus.

I recommend to anyone that wants to take control of their commute, explore the city at your own pace, or just want to break up the monotony of working out within the four walls of a gym (sorry, Equinox - still love you!).

Oh! Small apartment? Who cares? You don’t have to store it. Win. Win. Win. Win.

Tip: check to make sure the gear shifts & both breaks work to your liking. Also, seat before unlocking the bike of your choice, push down (hard!) on the seat to make sure it securely locks into place.

BIKE SAFELY!

by Bikie Angel

The enthusiasm of the whole crew at this app(tech, the ever-improving ground crew...) and their prompt responses online deserve five stars in every way.
As I read through the previous replies- I too am looking forward to the “plan a route” going out in full 4th in May.
When ppl complain and want to voice concerns they write it here but seldom do they take time to express their appreciation...

Ps Hope someday individuals could have the possibility of applying for an extended riding session-10,15mins without being penalized if going over 45 for like 30 seconds.

by JLD2111322

I have lived in the city for 15 years. Traveling on the MTA and becoming increasingly discouraged as time has commenced during my time here with all the price hikes, yet conditions in the subways have not improved. I have only been a member of Citi Bike little yet the freedom it has provided has been revolutionary. A viable, fun, transformational - in that it also serves as an excellent source exercise which releases happy endorphins that flood your system(!!!) - form of transportation! I look forward to seeing how much money it saves me! And even if it doesn’t save me - even if not the change/trade off in what I get from being a Citi Bike member will be worth it!

by Lou Loo

Isn't it obvious? You want to know if there are bikes at the dock. Then you want to put in an address where you're going to be riding. Then, you want the best route. None of this happens on CitiBike. And most of the time the information is inaccurate as far as number of bikes AND NOW addresses. I understand things change quickly in the city but at least get the map part right--- it's so infuriating!
NEW~ the plan your trip feature is back, but won’t recognize addresses in the city- namely where I work, which is a major, well-know publisher. The other irritating feature is that the list of close-to additional options underneath gives addresses in New Jersey and OTHER states(!) Why? Shouldn’t that list be populated with NYC addresses first? It’s so frustrating.

by Makhmutov

Avoid.

I just finished my ride and docked the bike. It was securely Iocked although the system kept thinking I’m still riding. CitiBike has no chat, no phone numbers, nothing. It suggested me to send an email. Doh.

Ok I left the bike locked in the dock still running and went home which was 15 min walk. At home I finally found a phone number in an email regarding my payment and called it. A support guy was keep saying I gotta go back to redock the bike. I wonder how given the fact it was dead locked and the most of all why should I take care of their faulty equipment. So here I am paying for the service I’m not using and having a zero support from the company.

by RhapAppUser

We are tourists in New York and this system is horrible. I’ve already overpaid for either being a minute late to a docking station because it takes time is a tourist to figure your way around. I also learned later that you need to have CitiBike in order to get single rides. So therefore we ended up paying for day passes. Unless you have CitiBike loaded on every user’s phone you can get into a situation where you get an additional charge on your card and therefore pay more. 30 minutes is not a lot of time to get to another station and still get a decent ride through Central Park and arrive back on time without getting a late fee. Just got charged 12 bucks because we made it just a few seconds late.

by Epl7727

CitiBike consistently mapped me a half a block away from the station I was standing at and wouldn’t unlock a bike. this app said I could get a key instead. However, they wouldn’t mail it to me. I had to find a key machine (a mile past my job) and get a key. The key works fine. Problem is, there are rarely bikes available in the two areas and times (in Midtown) that I need them. I’m able to get a bike about 45% of the time I get to stations. After giving the service a fair shot, I asked for a refund of my prepaid year membership. The refund limit is 14 days. It took 7 days to work out the key thing. How can a person judge this service in 14 days? It’s been 3 months and 18 emails and the situation hasn’t improved. Great idea, poor execution.

by Jdhinshej

CitiBike want you to log in but provides no information about your account. Want to see your trip history? App can’t do it. Go to the website. Want to see your last trip? App can’t do it. Go to the website. Want to see your Bike Angels points total? App can’t do it. Go to the website.

If you’re not going to build account management into CitiBike they very least you could do is provide a WebView with access to the website.

CitiBike is good as a station locator, but that’s basically all it does. And you can get that from the website just as easily. Why even have an app?

by Singoutandshout

I’ve been trying out this app for my commute. But after 10 rides, I’ve come to the conclusion that I must find another option in the city. Bikes are very often: without functional shifters (or other mechanical problems) or unable to be removed from their docks. And when you’re in a hurry, or when the weather is such that you want to get underway, this proves debilitating.

Also, for a commuter, to arrive during rush hour, you have to hoof-it to the nearest bike because all bikes near transportation hubs are gone - or full.

by Richmintz

This is an excellent and versatile app which I use every day. Trip planning functionality is good (and takes into account which docks have bikes available), availability info is always current (and updates automatically), user interface is simple to understand. I only wish full trip history was available within CitiBike as it is on the web, but other than that I’m very satisfied.

by Joeynz1975

I used to pay $120 a month to ride the subway as my commute to work. Now, I can ride back and forth for only $60 a year through my company’s reduced rate.

I now bike 8 Miles a day, and if I don’t do any other exercise throughout the whole day, I still feel good about my activity for the day.

It gets me to work in the same time (or less) than my two subway trains might take.

All the bikes work great, some are better than others but I’ve never had a serious issue with a bike. Some of handlebar grips slide over making the bell not work properly. Also, even though I ride up and down big slopes on the streets and over the Brooklyn bridge, I find that only 3rd gear is useful. I’ve tried 2nd gear going up difficult hills and it’s not strong enough. That being said, I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind ever switching to the first speed.

by Djhell1

Very cool convenient interface...seems accurate wrt bike availability, great feature that it tracks your rides. Would be nice if it synced better with Google maps...for instance recommending part this app and part subway routes. For instance: instead of “1 train to Times Square then change to the F” it could say “bike to 57th and 7th and catch the F train there”
Would save time plus keep you out of crowded stations.