This creator hacked a CitiBike to create NYC's affordability emergency harder to ignore

Justin Blinder was lugging Taco Bell burritos from neighborhood to neighborhood on his bicycle for his Uber Eats gig in 2020, observing as skyscrapers and standardized flat buildings gave way to brown-bricked accommodation projects and cracked streets.

It made the Brooklyn-based creator and application developer think viscerally concerning affordability, and how distracted the idea had rotate into in contemporary discourse.

"We're kind of confronted alongside that via top-down maps, and it really doesn't contact upon the lived experience," Blinder told Business Insider. "That was kind of akin the kernel of the project."

"The project," as Blinder describes it, is a 3D printed CitiBike attachment that adjusts pedal opposition depending on how rent-burdened the surrounding neighborhood is.

With the equipment attached to a CitiBike, a passenger can glide through parts of the Big Apple anywhere renters provision small of their paychecks to landlords. In areas anywhere renters provision additional — many parts of the Bronx, for case — the equipment applies the brakes.

Blinder stated the equipment is meant to physically tie riders to elevated rent prices in the city. He stated that too often, genuine problems in the earth rotate into innocuous data points that are peruse online and forgotten concerning shortly after.

"It's so uncomplicated to fair decrease group to numbers and ignore that all is somebody's sister or child, and these group have names and stories," Blinder said.

The equipment earned Blinder a $10,000 aid from Idle Hands, an imaginative philanthropic organization, this year.

It did not, however, power CitiBike. A spokesman for Lyft, which owns CitiBike, told Business Insider that CitiBike's conditions of assistance prohibit modification of any bikes.

"You may not modify, dismantle, compose on, or alternatively alter or deface a Bicycle or any part of a Bicycle in any way," the conditions say.

Affordability

It's no concealed that group struggle to pay rent in NYC.

An NYU Furman study established that "over half" of renter households in NYC spent additional than 30% of their annual earnings on rent in 2024 — a benchmark the study's authors, as fine as Blinder, categorize as rent-burdened.

According to the report, nearly 90% of low-income households alongside "extremely low" incomes were seriously or moderately rent-burdened in 2024. About 70% of these households spent additional than fractional of their total earnings on rent and utilities.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani rocketed into agency this twelvemonth in part by leveraging the term "affordability" alongside rhetoric and guideline proposals.

In June, one of Mamdani's signature run promises, freezing the rent, was approved by the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, although landlords sued to obstacle it in July, and the guideline remains tied up in litigation.

Headlines, however, equal if they're generated by a proactive mayor, do not accurately communicate the realities of elevated accommodation costs, Blinder said.

"It's trying to really provision the data a individual imprint again," he stated of the device.

"Ground Truth"

The equipment contains a GPS and an SD cardstock loaded alongside a tradition rent dataset that Blinder created for NYC, which assigns all obstacle in the city an "affordability score."

A block's affordability mark comprises the median portion of earnings spent on rent and the percent of renter households spending at smallest fractional of their earnings on housing.

Blinder called the project "Ground Truth" since it allows riders to awareness affordability in a distinctive way.

"Ground Truth intervenes by treating tactility not merely as texture or touch, but as conflict and labor unfolding complete time," his website reads. "Each pedal blow becomes a small encounter alongside the data's underlying representations."

Why CitiBike?

CitiBike, Blinder said, is not a fan of the project. And Blinder isn't exactly a fan of CitiBike, either.

The ubiquitous rent-a-bike assistance has rotate into "part of this cost of living emergency story," Blinder said. He stated the business has raised prices all twelvemonth for the former five years.

"CitiBike felt crucial since it benevolent of embodies this contradiction that's at the center of the project," Blinder said. "Really promises to create a additional accessible city, but it's additionally making that commitment slightly conditional, and making aspects of the city small affordable."

For Blinder's patrons, the equipment is an ingenious new activity of art.

"There's person who is doing item that is really breathtaking and dangerous," stated Linden Renz, who founded the organization.