Today, Lyft and the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) announced the formation of a new Equity Advisory Board for Citi Bike. The 20-person board—whose members include community organizations, cycling advocates, and city officials—will convene quarterly to discuss and evaluate Citi Bike’s equity strategy, and perhaps guide the bike share program into new territory.

“This is a forum to make sure we’re doing the very best we can,” Caroline Samponaro, Lyft’s head of micromobility, tells Curbed. “It’s fundamental to the success of serving the neighborhoods we want to serve.”

The board’s members hail from community groups working in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and include the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, RiseBoro Community Partnership, Healthfirst, El Puente, Upward Upbound, BronxWorks, WE Bike NYC, the Cyclopedia Bicycling Program, Union Settlement, GOLES, and the Lower East Side Employment Program. Representatives from NYCHA, the Department of Public Health, and the Human Resources Administration will also serve on the board.

“Community leaders talking about bike share—and connecting the dots for folks about what it is—is what activates the hardware and makes sure it’s used and loved by the neighborhoods where the stations sit,” says Samponaro.

Citi Bike is currently in Phase 3 of an expansion effort, made possible through a $100 million investment from Lyft, to extend service deeper into Brooklyn and Queens, complete the entire Manhattan grid, and introduce service to the Bronx. Between 2019 and 2023, Citi Bike will increase its service area by 35 square miles to a total of 70 square miles and triple the number of bikes available to rent to 40,000 total. This summer, Healthfirst and Citi Bike announced a $300,000 grant for community programs that grow bike ridership in low-income neighborhoods.

But the program’s expansions haven’t come without controversy, especially with regard to equity. Years ago, criticism from some communities included fears of gentrification; more recently, the critique has been that Citi Bike isn’t expanding fast enough to low-income neighborhoods. A report issued this summer by New York Communities for Change found that only 15.9 percent of New Yorkers living in poverty have access to bike sharing.

Less than a week later, three City Council members sent a letter to DOT decrying the inequities. “The reality is, if you’re granting a monopoly to a privately-run company, which the city has, the public needs to be kept informed,” the letter reads. “Because while Citi Bike is a private entity, it is unquestionably meant to be a public service that provides alternative transportation options, eases congestion, and improves air quality across the entire city.”

With each expansion phase, there’s a common refrain calling for more equity. But what does an equitable bike share actually mean? That’s where the Advisory Board comes in.

Some of Citi Bike’s existing community partnerships, and the interests of those groups, hint at what might come out of the advisory board’s work. Those include sponsoring community bike rides; a reduced fare program, developed in partnership with Healthfirst, that provides $5 monthly memberships for NYCHA residents and SNAP recipients; a program where health care providers at Woodhull Hospital and Interfaith Medical Center can “prescribe a bike” for diabetes and hypertension patients, which was developed closely with the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation; and Bike Share for Youth, which offers free helmets and annual memberships for teens. Each of these programs attempts to get more riders on the road and introduce the bike-sharing service to a broader swath of New Yorkers.

Samponaro notes that having groups working in public health, equitable development, environmental justice, and cycling advocacy all sitting at the same table can help combine best practices and perspectives in a new way. “We want to make sure we’re surfacing and taking advantage of ways to connect bike share to other social services to make sure community leaders are in touch about ways we can better serve them,” she says.

But equitable bike share goes deeper than just where stations are placed. At a ribbon cutting last week for a new Citi Bike station near Broadway Junction, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams called for more investment from DOT in better biking infrastructure: “As borough president and an avid cyclist myself, I am excited to see Citi Bike expand further into Brooklyn, including some areas where transit options can be limited,” Adams said Wednesday. “These new stations must be coupled with aggressive investments in street safety, with priority given to areas like East New York and Brownsville.”

The case of equitable cycling infrastructure is something members of the Equity Advisory Board are interested in approaching. “For me personally, my bicycle is such a vehicle for freedom and I never feel more happy and free than when I’m on it,” says Gigi Agius, the director of legal and finance at We Bike NYC, a non-profit that promotes cycling for female-identifying and gender non-conforming people. “I want more people of all shapes and sizes and colors and gender to experience that, but the thoughtful development of an integrated bike network is needed in order to achieve it.”

Closing the gender gap in cycling involves improving cycling infrastructure as well as addressing social stigmas. We Bike NYC hosts rides throughout the city for cyclists of all experience levels; many are specifically within the Citi Bike zone so people who don’t own their own bikes can easily participate. For the past few years, the non-profit has partnered with Citi Bike so it can offer free rides to those who want them. On a recent ride around Governors Island, 10 of the 18 participants used Citi Bikes.

“I am a big believer in ‘build it and they will come’ and you see that with any big bike infrastructure,” Agius says. “You see that with the Prospect Park West bike lane and Queens Boulevard. And Citi Bike helps with that because it is a type of infrastructure.”

In New York City, roughly 20-25 percent of regular bicycle riders are women; for Citi Bike riders, that percentage rises to roughly 32 percent. “With biking in the city, where there is more bike infrastructure, there are more women,” Agius says.

To Bishop Mitchell G. Taylor—a pastor at Center of Hope International, a non-denominational church near the Queensbridge Houses, and an advocate for public housing neighborhoods—it’s about taking a broader view about how Citi Bike can foster equity in New York City. In 2004, Bishop Taylor founded Urban Upbound, a non-profit that works to break the cycles of poverty, by focusing on employment services, youth outreach, financial counseling, and community revitalization. Urban Upbound has partnered with Citi Bike since 2016 on its workforce development programs, which included reduced price memberships for job seekers and supplying Citi Bike with workers to service bikes and docking stations.

“It’s not just the use of the [Citi Bike] product, but getting equity from the product,” Bishop Taylor says. “It’s thinking about: ‘How do we foster the development of more businesses, and cooperatives of businesses, to service the expansion of Citi Bike in all the areas Citi Bike is expanding to?’ They will need more people to fix the bikes and more people to service the bikes—why can’t they be minority-owned companies?”

By working on the Equity Advisory Board, Bishop Taylor is eager to make more recommendations for partnerships like the one he developed with Urban Upbound and to see them come to fruition.

“When the tide rises, all ships should rise together,” Bishop Taylor says. “This is an opportunity to create local wealth in neighborhoods that haven’t historically had that opportunity.”