Citi Bike Expanding Into Sunset Park, Officials Say

SUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN — Citi Bike will expand deeper into Sunset Park as part of a four-year expansion that will grow the bike's presence in more than two dozen New York City neighborhoods, officials announced Tuesday.

The city's bike-sharing service network will hit parts of the Bronx, cover all of Manhattan and expand further into Brooklyn and Queens by 2023 in an effort to double the program's service area, a map of the planned expansion shows.

Sunset Park, which currently only has two Citi Bike stations near Industry City, will be part of the Brooklyn neighborhoods that will get more bikes in those four years. Brooklyn's larger service area will also include Brownsville, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, East Flatbush, South Slope, Windsor Terrace, Prospect Park South and Kensington.

The expansion, first reported by the New York Post, was announced after a new report found Citi Bike's current service area serves a largely white, affluent population while shutting out poor people of color.

The expansion, which will grow Citi Bike's service area by 35 square miles, will start next year, with outreach to local community boards beginning this fall, Mayor Bill de Blasio's office said.

The roll-out will include a few phases, meaning some of the neighborhoods will get bikes sooner than others.

Sunset Park is marked on the map as part of "phase three" of the expansion, meaning it will likely be one of the last to get bikes after the initial phases of the expansion cover Manhattan and more northwestern parts of the borough.

Citi Bike has already begun putting docks in East Williamsburg and Bushwick and will place some in Ridgewood, Queens in the coming months, officials said.

"This expansion will help us build a more fair and equitable city for all New Yorkers," de Blasio, a Democrat, said in a statement. "Even more communities will have access to this low-cost, sustainable mode of transportation."

Lyft, Citi Bike's new owner, committed $100 million last fall to expanding the program's geographic reach and more than tripling the size of its fleet.

Citi Bike has said it will also roll out some 40,000 additional bikes in the coming years.

Patch reporters Noah Manskar and Kathleen Culliton contributed to this report.