It dawned upon me that I had worn the wrong shirt for undercover work. It was a hot morning in August, and I was standing on Broadway near Times Square, tracking seven men who did not want to be tracked.
I watched as each man unlocked a bike from a Citi Bike station on Broadway, across from the Ed Sullivan Theater. Then, the group pedaled one block east, deposited bikes at a dock on Seventh Avenue, ran back to Broadway, grabbed more bikes, and did it all over again.
Citi Bike, a bike-sharing network owned by Lyft, uses a few methods to move its bikes from crowded stations to in-demand docks. In 2016, it unrolled a program called Bike Angels, in which Citi Bike users can move bikes in exchange for points, awarded on a sliding scale. Each point is worth 20 cents.
Some savvy scofflaw riders with good stamina, like these seven, discovered that by working together, they could beat the system. By flipping stations — moving all the bikes from one station to another, then back again — they could earn the maximum number of points.
For the top performers — called Power Angels — it could net as much as $6,000 a month.
I followed the men on foot, hiding behind a tree, a dumpster and a magazine kiosk, trying to watch the action without being seen.
I failed. On their second trip, three Power Angels looked straight at me. (I blame the shirt, a purple button-up with cherry blossom flowers and rainbow-colored thread.) The men unlocked their next set of bikes, but instead of returning to Seventh Avenue, they sped off in different directions, abandoning their algorithm-beating streak and leaving me on the sidewalk thirsty, hot and alone.
“Yeah, we clocked you,” one later told me. I met him on several subsequent reporting trips, but like most of his fellow riders, he never gave me his name.
I learned of this classic, controversial New York hustle from a Reddit post emailed to me by an editor on the Metro desk at The New York Times. I started reporting in August, and things moved slowly: I messaged the commenters on the Reddit thread, but only one person responded, refusing to talk. Finally one of the Bike Angels, Brian Muller, agreed to meet with me.
He admitted that he was somewhat obsessed with the mechanics of real-world arbitrage. He does not flip stations, but agreed to lead me and the article’s photographer, Yuvraj Khanna, around Manhattan, showing us how top Bike Angels who don’t participate in the scheme make money: Citi Bike gives users a map featuring every docking station in New York City. Riders can earn up to four points for removing a bike from a crowded station, and up to four points for bringing a bike to a dock in need.
Brian had moved more than four bikes in the previous 24 hours; the algorithm rewarded him by multiplying every point by a factor of three.
Under perfect conditions, Brian can earn up to 24 points per ride, redeemable for $4.80. He made $2,600 in his first three months.
Brian likes the money, he told me, and the exercise. But it’s the strategy that he loves.
“I’m addicted,” he said. “You look at the app and say, man, there are some juicy points over there.”
As a regular cyclist who rides my own two bikes, I had a lot to learn about Citi Bikes. For example, the electric models handle well at fast speeds, topping out at 18 miles an hour, which is fun. But at walking speeds they grow unwieldy, with their front racks and heavy battery packs always threatening to topple the bike over.
A few other angels saw Yuvraj and me biking with Brian. That, along with my new familiarity with the system, made it easier to return to the Ed Sullivan Theater and approach riders. Most did not understand what all the fuss was about.
Besides, the hustlers said: They weren’t hustling anymore. Lyft had sent most of them an email warning that if they continued flipping stations, they’d be booted from Citi Bike. Rather than lose their lucrative side hustle entirely, they adapted, moving bikes between various docks rather than back-and-forth between the same two.
With the scheme dead, I feared my editors might kill the article. But even though Lyft is cracking down on station-flipping, riding bikes for profit remains a classic New York story: a bunch of sweaty, obsessive dudes taking a complex system created to benefit their fellow citizens, and milking it for rent money.
So I wrote. Then, a few hours before the article was published, a friendly Bike Angel suggested I check an independent website that tracks activity at every Citi Bike dock.
I saw a familiar pattern. That morning, 22 bikes suddenly disappeared from the station near the Ed Sullivan Theater. Fifteen minutes later, 31 bikes appeared on Seventh Avenue. Neither station emptied completely. But the online graphs bounced up and down for the next three hours.
The flippers were back, manipulating the algorithm to boost their revenue without tipping off Lyft.
The hustlers may have spotted me first. But I spotted them last.
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