The Hustlers Who Make $6,000 a Month by Gaming Citi Bikes

The bike-sharing program rewards users who help redistribute bikes around New York City. A few riders have figured out how to turn that into profit.

It was the perfect New York hustle, a scam of subtle perfection. And for three years, it helped Mark Epperson pay his rent.

The hustle, in its simplest form: Borrow a Citi Bike. Ride it one block. Wait 15 minutes, then ride it back.

Earn $6,000 a month (under ideal conditions, and with lots of work).

“This is one of my side hustles,” said Mr. Epperson, an actor who lives on the Upper West Side and works as an understudy in “Perfect Crime,” an Off Broadway play. “I’m probably a vulture in some people’s eyes. And I guess that’s fair.”

If Mr. Epperson’s insight into the scheme is simple, the circumstances surrounding it are anything but. Citi Bike, a bike-sharing program operated by Lyft that offers 27,000 bikes throughout New York City, Hoboken and Jersey City, promises seamless pickup and drop-off. Occasionally, though, a ride to work ends with the rider’s discovery that the docking station nearest the office is full. A dash to brunch is foiled by an empty dock, with no bikes available.

Both situations are annoying, especially for Citi Bike subscribers, who now pay $220 a year. To fix the imbalance, Citi Bike uses various tactics to move bikes to in-demand stations. One involves hiring workers to drive panel trucks around the city, delivering bikes where they’re needed.

Another, created in 2016, is a program called Bike Angels, in which Citi Bike users move bikes in exchange for points that could be cashed in for swag like water bottles and backpacks, membership discounts and gift cards. This being New York, where even charitable activities quickly develop overtones of competition, a handful of users started racing to see who could win the most points. Citi Bike called them Power Angels.

They won bragging rights, killer aerobic stamina (in the beginning, there were no electric Citi Bikes) and their initials atop an online leaderboard.

“We imagined people would do it as a recreational fitness kind of thing,” said David B. Shmoys, a data scientist at Cornell University whose research team created Citi Bike’s first rebalancing algorithm in 2014. “We never imagined anyone getting really obsessed.”

Over the years, a few users found ways to maximize the program’s financial benefits. By monitoring a map of stations on Lyft’s app, they noticed that the algorithm awards points on a sliding scale based on need. Removing a bike from a completely full station: up to four points. Docking at an empty station? That’s worth up to another four. People who move at least four bikes in a 24-hour period get all their points multiplied by a factor of three.

Lyft pays 20 cents per point. Each ride generates a maximum of 24 points. In perfect conditions, a person on a 3X streak who relocates a bike from a full dock to a completely empty one can earn as much as $4.80 for a single ride.

That doesn’t sound like a quick way to get rich. But a few riders realized that by working as a team, and quickly, they could exploit the algorithm. For Mr. Epperson and his fellow hustlers, it “created an opportunity to make a lot of money,” he said.

At 10 a.m. on a Tuesday last month, seven Bike Angels descended on the docking station at Broadway and 53rd Street, across from the Ed Sullivan Theater. Each rider used his own special blue key — a reward from Citi Bike — to unlock a bike. He rode it one block east, to Seventh Avenue. He docked, ran back to Broadway, unlocked another bike and made the trip again.

By 10:14, the crew had created an algorithmically perfect situation: One station 100 percent full, a short block from another station 100 percent empty. The timing was crucial, because every 15 minutes, Lyft’s algorithm resets, assigning new point values to every bike move.

The clock struck 10:15. The algorithm, mistaking this manufactured setup for a true emergency, offered the maximum incentive: $4.80 for every bike returned to the Ed Sullivan Theater. The men switched direction, running east and pedaling west.

When asked about this venture, some of them became defensive.

“How are we cheating?” said one Angel in a baggy gray T-shirt, black athletic shorts and sneakers, who declined to give his name. “If Lyft wants something else, they can change the algorithm.”

Others were more reflective.

“This is no longer exactly balancing the system,” said Mr. Epperson, who at the time occupied No. 18 on the leaderboard. “I understand, that’s not really in the spirit of the program.”

This is where the perfect New York hustle morphs into the classic New York beef. In mid-July, an online message board was created to address “Bike Angel cheaters.” The person described station flipping as “super frustrating,” because regular users might be inconvenienced by a station rendered artificially empty or full.

“People like this should have their memberships revoked,” a Reddit user with the handle Gerome926 wrote.

The thread attracted more than 100 comments. Some described flippers as “real life bots” engaged in “parasitic behavior.”

Apparent flippers joined the discussion. To them, flipping was an exhausting but harmless way to earn a living, and they encouraged their bicycle brethren to mind their own beeswax.

“People run scams across the city every day,” someone wrote under the username Nomotho. “There’s not really a large societal cost to this behavior.”

Brent Mittelstadt, a philosopher at the University of Oxford who studies the ethics of algorithms, is inclined to agree. In his eyes, Bike Angels perform essential work for Lyft, and save the company money. Lyft pays about 1,000 employees to move bikes around and perform basic maintenance like swapping e-bike batteries, said Jordan Levine, a Lyft spokesman. These employees receive vacation days and health insurance.

Lyft also relies on tens of thousands of Bike Angels in New York. Only the Top 20 make the leaderboard, and fewer than 10 have engaged in station flipping, Mr. Levine said. A few Power Angels earn enough money to pay some bills — one legendary Bike Angel, known to other riders only as Tommy, was rumored to have earned $60,000 last year. All pay taxes on those earnings, however, and none receive employee benefits.

So long as the argument over tactics doesn’t evolve into real-life intimidation, Professor Mittelstadt supports anything Bike Angels can do to boost their income and win some measure of control over the algorithm.

“There has been a subtle but very significant shift in power in favor of the tech companies,” Professor Mittelstadt said, with algorithms created to benefit the bosses at the expense of workers. Bike Angels face “a very fundamental problem with the gig economy we have now, which is the lack of fairness on behalf of the people who are doing the work,” he said.

That a handful of sweaty hustlers have managed to take back some of that power qualifies as a win, Professor Mittelstadt added. “It makes me smile.”

Lyft tolerated flipping for years, said a number of Angels, who remember the practice from before the Covid pandemic. But in late August, the company sent an email warning them to knock it off.

“It appears many of your points were earned by engaging in station flipping,” the letter read in part. “Continued instances of station flipping could result in removal from the Bike Angels program.”

Flippers seemed to be chastened. A few days after the email, six riders who had previously been flipping the station on Broadway returned to the Ed Sullivan Theater, but this time they rode down to Times Square, up toward Columbus Circle and west toward the river. None made the one-block round-trip to Seventh Avenue.

No flipping means less income, Mr. Epperson said. But Bike Angel work still pays. The current top Angel goes by the username NS143. In the first 18 days of September, NS143 accrued 19,394 points, according to the leaderboard, worth about $3,800.

Racking up that many points requires many full days of strenuous work, the riders said. So far, the truce between the complainers, the flippers and Lyft has mostly held. Then, on Wednesday morning, astute watchers of an independent online bike-share map noticed a familiar pattern.

At 10 a.m., 77 bikes were docked by the Ed Sullivan Theater. By 10:04, 22 of those bikes had disappeared. A block away, on Seventh Avenue, 31 bikes suddenly appeared. Neither station was left totally empty, but for the next three hours, dozens of docks toggled between empty and full, empty and full.

The urge to hustle would not be denied.

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