Living near the East Village, it’s not a rare occurrence to find the two Citi Bike stations nearest my apartment completely bare. When it happens, I have to walk to a station a couple extra streets to grab a bike.
No big deal. It’s not an everyday thing, but it’s not rare either. Walk walk walk – I remember how to do that.
What is rare is what happened today. At 11 AM this morning, I went to pick up a bike only to see my station (10th/A) completely empty. Normally, I check the app beforehand, but didn’t open the app until I found that station was empty.
When I did open the app to see which stations had bikes — I was shocked to see that not one bike could be found east of Second Avenue below Stuyvesant Town, all the way down to East Houston St. So the entirety of Alphabet City and a large swatch of the East Village. Here’s the horror that I saw:
By my count, not one bike could be found across 17 Citi Bike stations, not docks, but seventeen stations were completely empty. With roughly 25 docks per station — that’s approximately 425 empty docks in … at the same time. Some people have called this the “Dockpocalypse” — some people, meaning me.
UPDATE 10/23: Empty stations all over the East Village again today — around the same time at approximately 11:15 AM. A pattern?
