Citi Bike:
Wait, let me try that again.
Citi Bike:
That’s better.
There’s been lots of news lately about the smuggies’ efforts to lower the cost of e-Citi Bike trips, and when it comes to whining about that I’ve been quite timely. However, I’m woefully tardy in addressing this story in some local broadsheet newspaper about Citi Bike hustlers:
Basically, people whose main gigs don’t really do anything for anybody are helping to make ends meet by engaging in side gigs that actively inconvenience people:
See, sometimes Citi Bike docks are empty, which sucks when you want a bike, and sometimes Citi Bike docks are full, which sucks when you need to park a bike. (I’ve encountered this enough myself that I really don’t bother with Citi Bike anymore.) To address this, Citi Bike has this system that rewards users for helping “balance” the system–but predictably people have found a way to exploit it:
And instead of doing something with dignity, like, oh, I dunno, GETTING A GODDAMN JOB, these people just move bikes back and forth with no regard for the people who want to actually use them because I guess it beats working:
As a semi-professional bike blogger who also offers nothing whatsoever to society I’m not exactly in a position to judge these people–in fact this blog is essentially the literary equivalent of what they’re doing. I just move words around instead of bikes. But still…how are they not embarrassed? It’s impossible for me to like anybody in this story. The Bike Angel bottom-feeders, the shitty tech company who runs the bike share program, and even Oxford professor Brent Mittelstadt, who spends his days pontificating on the “ethics of algorithms:”
It’s not surprising he feels this way, since as an academic Professor Mittelstadt is himself a hustler who doesn’t even have to break a sweat. What the hell kind of ethicist is he, anyway? The algorithm they’re fooling is actually well-intentioned. As someone who’s been flummoxed by an unbalanced Citi Bike system myself I resent that people are exploiting a system meant to address it in a manner that actually makes it worse, all for personal gain. It’s really no different than fare-beating (which I realize is now considered ethical behavior by the smuggies, but whatever). In fact, it’s worse than fare-beating, since a fare-beater is just stealing a ride, but these people are actually getting paid to make legitimate customers’ experience worse.
Then again, I guess moving Citi Bikes around pointlessly is no worse than moving money around pointlessly, which is what day traders do. And I guess your Game Stop meme traders are the equivalent of these rogue Bike Angels, beating the system at its own game and sticking it to “the man,” or his algorithmic equivalent. But is making a bad system even worse by fucking with it ethically defensible? I guess I have to defer to Professor Mittelschmerz on that one.
But if there’s one thing I like even less than people getting over on the system, it’s people having fun:
As an aging curmudgeon there is absolutely nothing I detest more than people enjoying themselves publicly–though I do like this kid:
In an ideal world we’d punish our children for going to the mall instead of the Citi Bike race.
It’s also hard not to root for the nerds and their attempt to thwart the “semi-professional bike racer:”
It looks like the “semi-professional bike racer” is really just one of the local CRCA park jockeys:
It looks like he also happens to ride with the team that got into that highly entertaining kerfuffle with the TransAlt advocate:
This is also one of these situations where it’s really tough to take anybody’s side. The panting Fred who’s doing hot laps in a public park and taking no responsibility for his actions, the aggrieved advocate demanding “I NEED YOUR INFO…” In situations like this we need some sort of ethicist first-responder who arrives at the scene and tells everybody what to do.
As for the Citi Bike race, it’s organized by “Citi Bike Boyz:”
Yes, it’s a great tool for the city they seem to be destroying one bike at a time:
It makes for a great video though.
I wonder if anybody will ever do a story on all the abandoned Citi Bikes in the North Bronx and Yonkers:
I’d do it myself, but that sounds an awful lot like work.