The Loophole That Gets You Paid for Riding a Bike

Pictured above is a rack of Citi Bikes (with a cameo by the world’s greatest mascot). If you’re not familiar with the Citi Bike program, it’s pretty simple. Across New York City and the surrounding area are about 2,000 bike racks and 30,000 bicycles for rent — you can use one for 30 minutes for a one-time cost of $5, and there are memberships for people who want to use them more often. It’s a pretty neat program, and tens of thousands of people use it every day.

And a handful make some money by doing it — and by exploiting a loophole in the system.

Let’s start with the problem. Let’s say you’re commuting into Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal from the suburbs, as hundreds of thousands of people do each weekday. If you want to take a Citi Bike, you walk to the bike dock outside the station, use your phone to unlock the bike you’ve paid to rent, and pedal off to your destination a few blocks away. You park your bike at a dock near your office or wherever you’re going, and you’re done. And that’s where the problem occurs: the bikes don’t magically ride themselves back to Grand Central, so the next wave of would-be riders are out of luck.

To fix this, Lyft, which operates the program, shifts the bikes around during peak commute times, trying to ensure that there’s always a Citi Bike around when you need one. In 2013, Citi Bike told NPR affiliate WNYC that they use large trucks and a team of “rebalancers” to put the bikes where the demand is, and how hard it was to keep up with the flow of riders. But the relocated bikes were pedaled away almost as quickly as they were delivered. As one worker told the New York Times, “If we bring 37 bikes [back], by the time we’re gone, there are two left.” So over the years, they’ve not only added more trucks, but they’ve come up with other ideas — including incentivizing Citi Bike fans to move the bikes around for them.

That incentive program, called “Bike Angels,” debuted in 2016. Members of the program earn points for moving bikes from where they aren’t needed to where they are, and those points can be turned into rewards — Citi Bike credits, Lyft credits, a Citi Bike membership, or gift cards. That last prize is, effectively, the same as cash. As of this writing, 100 points was worth $10, but as recently as September 2024, they were worth twice that.

Under the program, not all bicycle relocations were created equal. As the New York Times reported, “the algorithm awards points on a sliding scale based on need. Removing a bike from a completely full station: up to four points. Docking at an empty station? That’s worth up to another four. People who move at least four bikes in a 24-hour period get all their points multiplied by a factor of three.” If you do the math, that maxes out at 24 points per ride (four plus four, all multiplied by three), which, at 20 cents per point, comes out to $4.80. That’s not a lot if you’re playing by the spirit of the rules, because in normal circumstances, full bike stations aren’t near empty ones.

But loopholes don’t work within the spirit of the rules — they just focus on the rules themselves. Groups of six to ten Angels teamed up to pull off a fun little scheme. They would each move one from a rack to a second one nearby, then run back to the original rack and do the same with a second bike and, if time permitted, a third and a fourth. Lyft’s algorithm resets every 15 minutes, so when the team of Angels moved all the bikes from one rack to another within that 15-minute window, they created the perfect situation: two Citi Bike stations, one completely full and another completely empty, located a block or two from each other.

From that point on, the scheme is easy — just bring the bikes from the full station to the empty one, wait for the 15-minute interval to lapse, and then repeat in the opposite direction. If a Bike Angel can move a bike once every five minutes — a reasonable but aggressive timeframe — they could earn as much as $50/hour (and get a lot of exercise in the process). And that’s exactly what a bunch of Angels were doing. One such bike flipper told Fox 5 New York that “he managed to earn between $1,000 and $2,000 every month over the summer, while others have made even more,” with some topping out at $8,000 a month.

As news of the scheme spread, Lyft took action. They cut the reward money in half and sent notes to those Angels who appeared to have been exploiting the system, telling them to stop — or risk losing access to the Angels program.

Bonus fact: Curious George, the fictional, cartoon monkey (here’s a pic if you need one) only exists today because of a bicycle. Curious George was created by H. A. and Margaret Rey, a German Jewish couple who lived in Paris in 1935 — a place that became unsafe for Jews only a few years later. As the New York Times reported, the Reys “fled from Paris by bicycle in June 1940, carrying the manuscript of what would become Curious George as Nazis prepared to invade.” (Per some reports, H.A. built the bikes himself.) With the help of the Portuguese consulate, the couple was issued an exit visa allowing them to travel to Spain en route to Brazil and ultimately New York. In 1941, New York publisher Houghton Mifflin published the first Curious George book.

From the Archives: The Made-Up Malady to Get Women Off of Bicycles: “Bicycle Face.”