Bike Angel Points Harder to Acquire

It's interesting to return to this thread from four years ago because over the past few weeks I have seen big changes in the points offered on the Upper West Side up to Harlem.  During 2024, one would regularly see "pink" stations, especially along Central Park West or Columbus.  Now they are rare.  In fact, for the last few morning, there have been only -1, 0, or +1 stations, and even with a 3x bonus, it's hard to engineer a 6 point ride.  I'm out there for exercise, so it's not a crisis, but the transformation of point values is a head-scratcher because even stations with no bikes at all (e.g., 116th x Broadway) have minimal entry points.  Maybe the algorithm has changed?

I don’t know how distribution used to work but there were times I would go to my station at 730am and there would be 8 ebikes and 20 regular bikes which seems like they were intentionally refilled, now my station never has e bikes and is rarely filled, there are all drop off points except in places like the west village. And the algorithm they use seems nonsensical. Some stations have 3 spots open but will have 2+ drop off points and some stations are literally completely empty and have 1 drop off point. 
it would incentivize us to refill stations if they offered more points. They’re already charging us to use citibike and incentivizing us to provide free labor (as customers) for tiny amounts of evoke credits which just further incentivize us to renew our subscriptions. Plus isn’t the city funding citibike at least in part? And isn’t it advertising that again we are offering for free by riding their branded bikes around? So stingy it’s wild 

I find Manhattan is tough to get points (previous years had ridiculous points in Brooklyn like 10, 15, 20 point stations regularly....I never saw something over 8 points in Manhattan.  I never was able to take advantage of the Brooklyn bonzanas...but slowly eked out 100+ a month.  I live in Harlem and it used to be the top of the map for bikes so usually there were some points around Central Park or parts of Harlem but since the expansion all the stations are either plus or minus.  There's rarely some empty and some full to move between so it's a lot more effort to try to find places to get quick/nearby stations that can be combined for points.  It takes a lot of time for little reward (and then you don't even get the physical rewards....)

This is especially true on the upper west side. The lack of bikes is going to kill citibike in this neighborhood. I don't know if it is their algorithm or if they just don't care. Even right now, the 10 stations closest to my home have a TOTAL of 6 bikes. And, in my experience, these are in broken docks where the bike can't be removed.

Bike Angel since August 2017 - 4,456 Lifetime points