BY KYLIE VOLAVONGSA | news@queensledger.com
FOREST HILLS — In Forest Hills, a perennial debate rages over cars, parking, congestion, and alternative forms of transportation.
Since their introduction to the neighborhood earlier this year, Citi Bike stations have increasingly entered the conversation — especially as installation has come at the cost of parking and sidewalk space and in tight, busy areas around Austin Street.
Marcia Hittner raised these concerns at Community Board 6’s September 17 meeting, claiming that she spoke on behalf of Forest Hills residents.
“The residents who pay taxes here deserve to have their needs come first. Many of our residents who want to ride bicycles already own them and have storage space for them. We are not space-deprived Manhattan,” Hittner said.
She continued: “So far, I have observed very little use of these Citi Bikes. These stations occupy valuable sidewalk and parking spaces, and add infrastructure demands. We need the data.”
That data is available on the Citi Bike website, with new files published every month. Information includes trip histories, start and end times of individual rides and stations of arrival and departure. Still, the sheer volume of spreadsheet entries can be dizzying for the casual reader.
Enter Zack Youngren: a Brooklyn-based software developer with a website that sorts those files into something more legible. The idea, he previously told Streetsblog, came from hearing familiar complaints at community board meetings that people weren’t actually using the bikes.
Forest Hills and Rego Park are home to about 44 stations, part of an expansion first proposed at a CB6 meeting in 2025.
While Hittner may be on the nose in terms of CB6 stations lagging behind other districts in bikeshare use, the percentage of the district’s overall population that use Citi Bikes isn’t too far off from that of nearby neighborhoods.
“Usages,” in this case, refers to the total number of arrivals and departures at each station within the district.
Based on calculations from Youngren’s website, the earliest available statistics for Community Board District 6 bikeshare usage — this June to August — show that Citi Bikes have been used over 57,000 times, equal to about 652 users a day.
Numbers shrank in the first month of June, when bike arrivals and departures totaled 8,300. But the tally jumped to over 24,000 in July and stayed in that range through August, peaking at roughly 20% of the district’s population, per the 2016 census.
For the last three months, Community Board District 5 saw station usage totals in the mid-80,000s — a peak that’s continued to grow from years prior, and comes out to a near 23% of the district’s total population.
In Community Board District 4 — which includes Elmhurst and Corona — station usage in the first summer (June through August of 2023) was in the lower 40,000 range and has stayed mostly consistent in the summers since then. That would be about 28% of the district’s population.
Leading the pack in Queens, though, is Community Board District 1, which covers Long Island City and Astoria. Since 2023, peak station arrivals and departures have remained in the 295,000 to 300,000 range — a far larger 67% of the population.
Still, it’s a bit early to form a solid conclusion on how much and how often Forest Hills and Rego Park residents are availing themselves of the bikeshare program. As Citi Bike parent company Lyft rolls out the final phases of expansion in the area, that picture will surely grow clearly.
