The racks were always there, residents will soon insist, beside the subway entrance, in front of the deli, sprawled across a plaza outside Grand Central Terminal. How quaint those afternoons were, before the bikes came.

“Amusing to see the comments of all the New Yorkers as they discover cycle hire,” Ed Freyfogle, a veteran of Europe’s systems, wrote on Twitter, “3 years after London.”

Eben Weiss, the blogger known as the Bike Snob, said the grumblings were to be expected. “That’s the stereotype of a New Yorker — the person who’s brusque and impatient and thinks it’s the only city in the country,” he said, pausing to consider the point.

“Of course, there’s some truth to it.”

For other American cities, the frustration is understandable. Overnight, New York’s system became the largest in the country, eclipsing popular programs in Washington and Boston by installing 6,000 bikes across more than 300 stations.

The Bloomberg administration has not been coy about publicizing this fact.

Between the program’s inception on Monday morning and 5 p.m. on Tuesday, cyclists traveled a total of 32,265 miles on the system during nearly 13,000 trips, officials said. More than 20,000 people have signed up for annual memberships.