After spending most of the summer away from home, on tour with his band, Dylan Chenfeld was thrilled to return to New York and slip into his old routines.
But his first time back on an electric Citi Bike — his beloved “White Stallion,” as he calls it — he realized something was amiss.
Pedaling into an intersection, he presumed the bike’s motor would propel him safely through the crossing traffic. But the boost never came, and before he knew it, he was skittering a few feet from the hood of a car.
“I was like, ‘Am I bad at this now?’ ” said Mr. Chenfeld, 31, the frontman for Rebounder, a pop rock band.
The close call, it turned out, was not entirely Mr. Chenfeld’s fault.
Over the summer, the mayor’s office had ordered Lyft, the operator of Citi Bike, to reduce the top speed of its electric bicycles from 18 miles per hour to 15. The directive preceded an announcement from the city last month requiring all e-bikes in the city, beginning Friday, to obey a 15 m.p.h. speed limit.
To many people, including those who see e-bikes as contributing to a growing feeling of chaos on the streets, it was a reasonable move. E-bikes have been responsible for an increase in cyclist deaths in recent years. But for New Yorkers like Mr. Chenfeld, who cherish the hulking gray bikes with cultish devotion, it was something of a bummer. The bikes over the past 18 months had already grown incrementally more expensive. Now they were getting slower.
Since its debut three years ago, the gray electric Citi Bike has achieved something rather remarkable. New Yorkers rarely rave about their subway rides. They tend not to lavish praise upon the bus. But the new bikes created a community of people who not only tolerated their daily commutes but actively enjoyed them, who treasured their time atop the hulking machines, who coined pet names for them.
The White Stallion (“That’s the accepted nomenclature on Canal Street,” Chenfeld said). The Ghost. The Silver Surfer. The Hellcat.
And yet, the city’s most visceral charms often reveal themselves as ephemeral, and there is worry among devotees of the Stallion that its best days are gone, that it has joined the list of local pleasures — outdoor dining, the Pearl Paint shop in Lower Manhattan, original recipe Four Loko — that were simply too good to stay good.
Leigh Harlow, 35, is among those who are worried. When she moved to New York six years ago, she found herself immune to its allure. Having spent the previous seven years in the more intimate confines of New Orleans, she felt alienated by the sheer scale of her new city.
That changed, in part, because she began riding electric Citi Bikes across the Manhattan Bridge to her apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It was invigorating. It was mentally grounding. It was fun.
Once, on one of these rides, the beat of an Arcade Fire song swelled from her one earbud just as she crested the bridge, the glowing panorama of the city unfolding around her, and she felt something close to euphoria.
“There was something about going over the bridge that was like, ‘Oh, this is why people live here,’ ” Ms. Harlow said, laughing. “It brings back this sense of childlike wonder.”
This specific element of Citi Bike experience — e-biking over a bridge, preferably at night — has developed its own ardent following. Liberated for the most part of any physical exertion, e-bikers can instead focus on the texture of the road vibrating up their arms, the wind streaking across their cheeks, the speed heightening their consciousness.
“You do it in the evening, with the sunset — hell yeah,” said Jackson Harris, 25, who lives in Alphabet City and commutes to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where he works as a host at a restaurant. “It’s such a little cinematic movie moment.”
Mr. Chenfeld, the musician, likened the feeling to driving a car with the top town. Michael Russo, 40, whose daily commute often involves an electric Citi Bike ride from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, has made nighttime bridge rides a fixture of his recommended itineraries for out-of-town guests.
“People who usually take a car home, I’m like, ‘No, not tonight,’ ” he said. “It is a magical experience.”
The magic was tempered, somewhat, this summer. The only reason Ms. Harlow was not more frustrated was that she had already cut back from her previous daily use of Citi Bikes after a series of price increases had complicated the calculus of her commute.
Lyft raised prices for e-bike rentals twice in 2024 and again in January. At the moment, members of the program pay $219.99 a year and 25 cents per minute to use the electric bikes. Nonmembers pay $4.99 to start a ride and 38 cents per minute thereafter.
“And if you’re decreasing the speed, you’ve effectively increased the price again,” Mr. Harris said. “It’s a per-minute thing. So that really pissed me off.”
Replacing a previous generation of e-bikes, the gray bikes debuted in May 2022 with a blistering top speed of 20 m.p.h. Future generations may come to regard the ensuing months as the golden age of the Ghost. A few weeks later, Jerome Peel, 35, known on social media as Citibikeboys (although he is just one boy), filmed himself astride an e-bike, going airborne off a set of ramps at Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan.
“Testing the GHOST,” he captioned one post, before uploading another the next day: “We approve of the ghost.”
Since then, however, Mr. Peel has evolved into something of an e-bike skeptic, seeing them as a perversion of the urban cycling ethos, transforming bike lanes into the autobahn.
“Go ride a real bike, get a sweat on,” said Mr. Peel, who organizes an annual Citi Bike race (for the nonelectric blue ones, or “acoustic bikes,” as e-bike heads like to call them) across the Williamsburg Bridge. “You can still go fast if you put in some effort. But people are terrified of putting in effort.”
To this, the electric Citi Bike lovers might retort: precisely.
Many were commuters before they were bike enthusiasts. Enjoyment and ease, not some bicycling code of honor, are their aim. Along with the other charms of urban cycling — fresh air, a front-row seat to observe the streetscape, vehicular autonomy — the ability to arrive at work or dinner feeling relatively clean and unweary carries a lot of weight.
“On the old Ghost, you could destroy a hill like Jonas Vingegaard,” said Dennis Young, Ms. Harlow’s partner and fellow gray bike enthusiast, referring to the two-time Tour de France champion. “Now I have to push a tiny bit to get up the hill.”
This accumulation of these various frustrations — the lowered speeds and higher prices, not to mention the mayor’s decision this year to criminalize several minor cycling violations — has led many New Yorkers this year to take up restoring Citi Bike speeds as a fervent, if sometimes tongue-in-cheek, pet cause (even as they acknowledge, more seriously, that expanding the network of bicycle lanes and increasing bike access were more pressing issues).
“Need our next mayor to increase e-bike speed back to 18 mph on day one,” Chi Ossé, a Brooklyn councilman, wrote on social media this summer.
The front-runner for mayor, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, has yet to articulate a specific stance on Citi Bike speeds. But the e-bike appreciators at the very least have reason to believe he is one of their own. He has taken gray bikes to campaign events and suggested he could, if elected, use them to commute to City Hall.
Recently, Mr. Mamdani was filmed releasing one of the hefty e-bikes from an Upper East Side station.
A bystander, apparently not a fan, called out to him: “Communist!”
The candidate smiled as he mounted the bike.
“It’s pronounced ‘cyclist,’” he said, pedaling away.
Andrew Keh covers New York City and the surrounding region for The Times.
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