[M II A II R II K]

Here’s One Way to Fix Citi Bike So It Doesn’t Only Serve Rich People Who Already Live Near Subways

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/07/...-near-subways/

.....

- Citi Bike serves mostly rich white people. All you need to do is look at the coverage map to see that. But that shouldn’t be your only takeaway from a new report from New York City Communities for Change, an activist group that is calling on the city to ensure that Citi Bike lives up to its promise of equity when it announces its long-awaited expansion this summer. — The report [PDF] is not a stinging indictment of Citi Bike — but it is a reminder of how many more low-income, subway-deprived people the supposedly public bike share system could be helping outside the current coverage area in Manhattan and thin slices of gentrified Brooklyn and Queens.

- Roughly 20 percent of New Yorkers without access to bike share live in poverty, but that figure drops to 15.9 percent for New Yorkers with Citi Bike, the report said. “Meanwhile, three-quarters of neighborhoods in extreme poverty are located outside the Citi Bike service area,” it added. So with equity as the focal mission, the report identified roughly 760,000 “disproportionately poor and non-white New Yorkers without good subway access who would benefit from an equity-focused bike sharing network expansion” most of whom live in The Bronx and Queens.

- The report’s proposed expansion zones are an effort to merge two partially independent factors: bringing Citi Bike to “disadvantaged” neighborhoods and using Citi Bike to increase access to transit in neighborhoods where the nearest subway station is a long walk away. To determine the best way to do that, the authors constructed a “vulnerability index” based on an area’s median household income, percentage of the population living in poverty, the percentage of the population which are people of color, and the percentage of the population without a bachelor’s degree.

.....