Digging out and moving forward

Snow removal crews have manually cleared docks at 600+ Citi Bike stations since the January 25 storm. We’ll keep ramping up crews to clear 300+ stations per day and expect to have a majority of our 2,200 stations cleared by Monday evening.

This has been a record-breaking storm, causing stations to get plowed over after we’ve cleared them and snow freezing into solid ice. For Citi Bike workers’ safety, we don’t deploy snow clearing resources until conditions are improved. To accelerate this work, we also augmented this workforce with contracted teams who were busy with other snow removal jobs around the city. The snow removal crews are now using pickaxes and sledgehammers to free the bikes, which is effective but takes much longer than shoveling.

To ensure we make all 2,200 stations in the system usable as quickly as possible, we are clearing 10 docks at each station. We will continue work after Monday, February 9, to clear additional docks, and expect next week’s warming temperatures to help free up space for bike parking.

The iced-in stations have also prevented battery swapping crews and operations teams from safely servicing bikes, so we are working round-the-clock to resolve a battery swapping and maintenance backlog and have bikes ready once the snow is removed. This will cause temporary ebike availability challenges. We are scaling ebike and maintenance labor now to tackle this backlog.

We know New Yorkers rely heavily on this system. Our profound thanks go to the Citi Bike team and additional crews that have supported efforts to shovel out our stations day in and day out.

Most importantly, thank you to our riders who depend on the program for your patience and support. We will continue to provide updates on our progress.