Citi Bike To Offer Free Rides For A Day — With One Catch

NEW YORK CITY, NY - Citi Bike is offering free rides on Wednesday — with just one catch.

To participate, you have to sign up – and give your credit card info – to Citi Bike’s mobile app. Then you get a code providing access to a bike for up to 30 minutes.

But if a half hour goes by and you haven’t docked your shiny blue ride at one of 600 stations in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, you’ve gotta pay up, a spokesman confirmed to Patch. It costs $4 for every 15 minutes extra. That's the same penalty riders face when they rent from Citi Bike.

But, the spokesman added, you get unlimited 30-minute rides on Wednesday.

“Citi Bike is in more neighborhoods than ever before. If you’ve been wanting to give the system a try, the August 2 free ride day is a great time to do it," Citi Bike General Manager Jules Flynn said in a statement.

Citi Bike is offering a spoonful of sugar to go with the experience. Noosa yogurt is giving away free samples at the Citi Bike station at the Bowling Green subway stop on Wednesday.

The promotion comes as Citi Bike is seeing record ridership levels. The bike share service logged 70,286 trips on just one day last week, according to the New York Times.

Lead image by Ron Cogswell via Flickr/Creative Commons.