IT’S been a year since Citi Bike started in New York City, and the program has been a tremendous success, with more than 100,000 annual members and over seven million trips to date. Or, if you prefer, in Citi Bike’s first year, the program has struggled financially and is in urgent need of tens of millions of dollars.  Both are true, so take your pick.  The story of bike share in New York City has been one of contradiction and antagonism, even before its inception:  “$10 to ride a bike? That’s for rich people!”  “A bike share station in front of my building? How is the doorman supposed to hail me a cab?”  By the time the program was ready to roll, the calamitous prognostications came pell-mell. This town’s too tough for bike share! The streets would run red with the blood of hapless tourists and the helmetless! All 6,000 bikes would be stolen by America’s most industrious bike thieves!  None of these predictions came to pass. In our egotistic frenzy, we had forgotten a few things, such as that the average person can ride a bike just fine, tourists aren’t as hapless as we think they are and bike thieves aren’t interested in stealing big, clunky bikes equipped with GPS trackers. We had assumed a kind of New York exceptionalism, when similar bike share programs were already running successfully in Paris, London and Washington.  Instead, the program proved immediately popular. After just one month of operation, the system had over half a million trips, with 50,000 annual members signed up and 1.28 million miles traveled. Citi Bike use may have dipped during the winter (a harsh one), but so does car use. You may have noticed that half the cars on your block remained buried until the spring thaw, their owners enjoying free storage on some of the most expensive real estate in the world.  There was, however, one expectation that the world’s most heavily scrutinized bike share system failed to meet: economic self-sufficiency.  As robust as the program’s user numbers were, it turned out that offering cheap annual memberships ($95) and relatively costly 24-hour passes ($9.95) was not the best pricing structure to underwrite the system. Initially, giving regular users more favorable rates supported the city’s claim that Citi Bike was a system “by New Yorkers for New Yorkers.” Now some say the system needs to look to tourists and short-term users for profitability.  But was the goal of self-sufficiency ever reasonable? There is no form of public transportation that does not benefit from some sort of subsidy. New York City Transit, Metro North and the Long Island Rail Road cover less than half of their expenses with rider fares. The rest of their funding comes from taxes, toll revenues and state and local subsidies.  The city even subsidizes ferry service from the Rockaways and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to Pier 11 in Manhattan. This ferry has cost well over $3 million to date, and it has fewer than 1,000 riders per day. The only day the Citi Bike system had fewer than 1,000 riders was Feb. 13, when almost 10 inches of snow fell on the city.  Yet Citi Bike was supposed to be different. Our tax dollars were not paying for it. Instead, it would be sustained by an optimistic projection of subscription revenues and corporate sponsorship — a sort of Bloombergian perpetual motion machine.  Other bike share programs run differently. Capital Bikeshare in Washington is partly financed by a grant from the United States Department of Transportation, as well as other regional subsidies. Vélib’ in Paris is funded by JCDecaux, an advertising company, in exchange for control of some 1,600 billboards — space it sells to clients. In London, the system is sponsored by Barclays Bank, but also looks to Transport for London as well as local councils to help fund its expansion, which ultimately costs the taxpayers.  Granted, only the fact that New Yorkers weren’t ostensibly paying for Citi Bike allowed it to overcome ingrained cultural resistance. Mayor Bill de Blasio has made it clear that he will not give city funds to Citi Bike.  This is a shame. Sure, Citi Bike is not indispensable; after all, this is not the subway we’re talking about. Yet it’s difficult at this point to imagine New York City without it — and we shouldn’t have to. It’s a fantastic amenity and a convenience to many thousands of people, from the tourist to the workaday commuter heading from Grand Central to an office. And where would the New York media be without paparazzi shots of Leonardo DiCaprio riding one on the sidewalk?  Perhaps most important, bike share is an integral part of a change in street design that has had a palliative effect on New York City streets, calming them and making them safer for all of us no matter how we travel. It’s an essential part of the urban ecosystem, like bivalves helping to clean a polluted waterway.  As Citi Bike enters its second year, it does so having passed both the safety test and the popularity test. Now it faces its biggest and most important test, which is whether we’ll forgive it for being unprofitable and poorly managed in the past, and commit to maintaining and improving it for the future — even if, ultimately, it should prove necessary to use city funds. When our auto industry sputtered, it got a bailout. When our banking system, Citibank included, was on the brink of collapse, it got a bailout.  Citi Bike is minuscule compared with the auto industry, or the banking industry or even the rest of the transit system, but its tiny size belies the positive effects it’s already had on the city. If we can find a way to keep bike share running in New York City, then it, too, will have officially become American.  Eben Weiss, the author of “The Enlightened Cyclist: Commuter Angst, Dangerous Drivers, and Other Obstacles on the Path to Two-Wheeled Transcendence,” writes the BikeSnobNYC blog.  A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 24, 2014, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Bike Share’s Rough Ride. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Despite predictions of disaster, New York turned out to like bike share. But will it pay for it?